5 Fabulous Free Fonts Sites You Need To Use
I’ve got a little confession to make: I’m an obsessive font nerd. With that out of the way, I’m sure you can relate to the frustration of trying to find the perfect font in the big jungle of internet free font sites. But fear not, my friend. Today, I’ll share the best free type resources where you can easily find great fonts that look incredible and that are 100% free for commercial us. So… let’s get right into it!
1. Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is probably one of the best free type resources. The thing that really that sets it apart is that all of the fonts you’ll find in Font Squirrel are free for commercial use — something that is not the case in some of the sites mentioned below. Most free font sites have a lot of options, but there are quite a few of them that are only free for personal use. You can easily see this when you check the license of the font or when you filter your search by selecting an option called “free for commercial use”.
Font Squirrel does have a smaller selection of fonts compared to the other sites, but don’t let that detract you at all, because the ones that they have are beautiful and of exceptional quality. It has a small section called Test Drive where you can type in your text and see how the selected font looks.
Downloading fonts is easy — just click the download button at the top right, unzip it, and double-click either the otf or ttf file to install it in your system. Easy peasy!
Another very cool thing Font Squirrel has is a Font Identifier, where you can upload an image of a font you like or are trying to match.
2. DaFont
I’ve probably scrolled hundreds of hours in DaFont. It’s just an awesome website with countless options to choose from.
The very first thing you see when you access the website in how well categorized everything is. Like this:
You have script fonts, retro, Chinese, Arabic, cartoon fonts that are awesome for kids’ books… you name it.
The installation procedure is exactly the same as in Font Squirrel.
The whole website experience is also great. You can easily navigate through the site and see all the important details of every font quickly (like how they look, if it’s free for personal use or commercial too, the style/category the font belongs to, an option to donate to the creator of the font, etc.).
DaFont does have a little bit of an “old school” vibe in their website. Those of us who have been using it for a long time don’t really mind. If you’re a new visitor, it might be a bit of a turn off, but I don’t think it should be because as soon as you delve into all the options you’ll see that it offers great value.
If you’re main goal is to find free commercial use fonts, the best thing to do is to select a category and then narrow your search down by filtering out the free for personal use fonts. Here’s how you can easily do this:
- Select a category
- Click on the “More options” drop-down filter.
- Select the option “100% Free”
That’s it!
3. Font Space
If you’ll allow me, I’ll start off saying that Font Space has a tiny thing that bugs me a little bit: it’s cluttered and with lots of ads everywhere. It just doesn’t look as neat and tidy as the previous two free font sites.
But with that small thing out of the way, Font Space is still one of the best free type resources!
If you visit it, you’ll see that it’s quite similar to DaFont in many ways (except in the website design). You have all the categories to choose from and lots of fonts submitted by awesome designers too.
Not every font is for commercial use, so it’s also important to follow the steps below if you’re using fonts for commercial purposes.
- Type in a style of font that you want in the top right search bar (say, for example, ‘vintage’ or ‘serif’).
- Click on the Filter that appears right next to where it tells you the amount of results your search has (example: showing 1 to 11 of 819 Results).
- Select “only show commercial-use fonts”.
- Click Apply.
- Scream your achievement from the top of a rooftop (or don’t… rooftops are dangerous).
Downloading any font is also as easy as the previous websites.
A great thing I really like about Font Space is that it’s very, very explicit about the fonts’ licensing, which I think is awesome because it gives zero room for mistakes and misunderstandings when using their fonts.
4. Google
Google provides a remarkable service with their endless options of awesome free fonts. You can easily see this by how major websites are relying more and more in Google fonts as their chosen option for their web design typography.
All of their fonts are open source, which means that all the options that you’ll find in Google fonts are free to use for whatever you like, including commercial use.
There’s one not-so-tiny inconvenience with Google fonts: the categories are very limited. Google only has 5 categories:
- Serif
- Sans Serif
- Display
- Handwritting
- Monospace
That can be a bit of a pain if what you’re looking for is a little bit more specific. Say, for example, that you want a “Western/Wild Wild West” font. In this case you have two options: use the search bar or do a Google search.
The search bar does help you a little bit. If you type in “western” (or the type of font you’re searching for), you’ll see it gives you some options indeed… but not all of them. Rye is a cool western type of font, but its name doesn’t make it obvious and thus it’s not easy to find when you’re only using Google Fonts’ search bar. That’s why it’s always best to do a quick Google search with some articles that will probably inform you about other cool Google font options you might’ve otherwise missed.
And then you have their download process, which is a bit weird (in my humble opinion). Whenever you want to download the font that you want to use, you have to click the red plus symbol that says “select this font” at the top right side of the screen. That’ll create a “fonts selected” button, which you have to click on, then click the download button. It might seem a tad strange, but once you’ve done it a couple of times, it’s very simple.
5. 1001 Fonts
Last but not least we have 1001 fonts, a website with also a huge selection of high-quality options and one of the best free type resources. Beware though! Not all options are free for commercial use, so if that’s what you want then make sure to start your search here.
1001 Fonts has more of “straight to the point” type of design, and I love that.
You can also use their very detailed category search by clicking “Font Categories”, where you’ll find cool font styles like “Hard to Read”, “Feminine” or “Masculine” fonts. Great stuff if you ask me!
Just like Font Squirrel, it has the feature of inserting your own text, where you can type what you wish and then be able to see all fonts with what you wrote.
Enjoy Our Best Free Type Resources? We Love Sharing. But Why Stop There?
There are so many more websites that I could mention, but there’s really no need for me to do so because the 5 options above are some of the best free type resources you’ll find out there today. Go and have a look and you’ll easily find exactly what you’re looking for!
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