There are many typefaces options out there, complex and different in styles, and it can be difficult to choose one for a project. How do you actually do that? Firstly, you will have to imagine the impression of the audience, what they will think about it, if it’s appropriate for them and useful in the context of your design design and target audience.
Secondly, you can’t forget about the basic things that you should look for in a font, legibility and readability. The width of the strokes and the presence of the novel type design are aspects that shouldn’t be ignored. Also, in terms of readability, the type style, size, tracking, leading and other properties must be taken into consideration when choosing a font for your designs.
After going through these first two steps, you’ll be thinking about aesthetics.
While a lot of fonts are well designed and look quite nice in their presentation image, they can’t be used all over the place, instead you’ll see that they fit better only in a certain type of designs. You can’t use Attitude (an example from our article) for a document because it won’t be taken seriously.
In the end you’ll see that the personal choice of a font is not a personal choice anymore, and the actual concept is minimized. You can’t choose a font just because you like it, your audience must like it too and it must fit in your design flawlessly.
Professional free fonts are vitally important in web page design. Precise, accurate, balanced geometric forms give written characters that special clarity, sharpness and elegance that lifts a web page into another class.
Elegant and professional looking fonts impress viewers, helping your message to achieve its desired effect. There are many excellent professional looking font styles that will appeal to professional web designers for use in their work.
When a web designer chooses a professional quality font, the very look of the text invites and encourages readers to read.
I wrote this big description for how you should use a font because I received feedback from some of my visitors who were saying that they loved a certain font and used it in their websites, brochures, business cards etc. You should use a font carefully because otherwise you could look like a newbie designer and very few clients are courageous enough to hire newbie designers.
With more and more designers in the world, cool free fonts are released even quicker than usual which makes us more than happy. Download these free fonts and you’ll have a rich typography toolbox with which you can make a solid impression in your future designs and projects. You’ll see that there are various styles in here, from serious and rigid ones to fancy and creative examples of typography.
Campton
Campton is a simple sans serif with a geometric skeleton, based on the mid to early twentieth century visual trend of achieving neutrality. Although, there are a lot of typefaces focusing on similar principles, tries to find its niche in the field of anonymous typefaces by combining simplicity with a subtle friendliness.
It is perfectly suited for graphic design application ranging from editorial and corporate design via web and interaction design through to product design.
Anke Sans
Moderne Sans
Moderne Sans is a clean sans-serif typeface free for you to download, created by Marius Kempken. Inspired from the great 1920s font families.
Densia Sans
Densia Sans is an economic sans serif, designed to be used in sizes from 6 to 14 points. Its tall x-height and narrow width make it shine whenever there’s very limited space.
Not only it is space-saving, Densia Sans features a complete set of 820 glyphs, including small caps, case-sensitive forms, proportional and tabular figures, superiors, inferiors, and fractions. Also, its character set supports over 30 languages.
Duma
DUMA is a sans that is characterized with long legs and very extended. Each character was individually made in Illustrator using basic geometric shapes.
Gaspar
Simplifica
It is a slightly condensed sans-serif typeface featured by an uniform and thin line width. Its high positioned capsheight and ascender favours legibility. A fine, simple and clear font that you can’t miss.
Source Serif Pro
Source Serif Pro is a serif typeface in the transitional style, designed to complement Source Sans. Their close companionship is achieved by a careful match of letter proportions and typographic color.
While designed to harmonize with its serif-less counterpart, Source Serif often takes its own direction, in part because the two are inspired by different historical precedents. Source Serif is loosely based on the work of Pierre Simon Fournier, and many idiosyncrasies typical to Fournier’s designs (like the bottom serif on the b or the middle serif on the w) are also found in Source Serif. Without being a pure historical revival, Source Serif takes cues from the Fournier model and reworks it for a modern age.
Cocogoose
Quicksand
UGO
Encode Sans
The Encode Sans family is a versatile workhorse. Featuring a huge range of weights and widths, it’s ready for all kind of typographic challenges. It also includes Tabular and Old Style figures, as well as full set of Small Caps and other Open Type features.
Gasalt
Railway
FARRAY
Overpass
Sant Joan Despí
Streetwear
Streetwear is bold and stylish retro inspired script typeface suitable for logo, poster, branding, packaging and t-shirt design. It looks like 1960s and 70s fashion and sport related typeface, unique and fun at the same time. You can access Streetwear’s alternate characters by using OpenType savvy program such as Adobe Illustrator and InDesign.
Rose
Fabiolo
Anurati
Anurati is a new futuristic font the author worked on during the making of his website. Originally made to be free, this font makes way for the creativity of each and every one.
Margot
Margot is an adoring type family designed and optimized for its use in large sizes. Margot is vibrant, cheerful, perfectly suited for a great variety of typographical purposes and free.
Fenton Font family
Fenton Font family comes with 6 weights. The design was inspired by (convex) camber. It has a higher lowercase structure than the normal ones. It has a modern, rounded and squared character. Each weight contains 370 glyphs.
It is a type family which you can use in brand and model names of technological devices, newspaper and magazine ads, logos, posters, apps, banners and promo images.
Young Serif
Soria
Soria has been created under art noveau influence and the didot fonts, as a result, we have a modern and actual type that we can use it for display texts.
Monopoly
Humblle Rought
Five
Five — contemporary display monoweight typeface with light retro accent. It designed in two styles — Regular and Oblique. Framework of the glyphs gives the opportunity to make a lot of ligatures. I think, Five is ideal for some expressive typography works like headlines, posters, small texts. it looks excellent in a large size.
Kazmann Sans
Luxia
Luxia is a modern san-serif didone with a splash of lavish characters.
Now Font Family
Now Alt Typeface is a simple geometric typeface by Alfredo Marco Pradil. Now Typeface is open source. Now Alt is an alternate version of the Now typeface.
Matias
Karmina Bold
Sail
Sail Font is a Didot script for headline, display and poster uses. A fresh air comes to all the glyphs, its windy uppercases are especially suited for display texts and web navigation. Elegant swashes and a clean lowercases also make it suitable for larger paragraphs.
Fina – ultra thin, modern font
Meet Fina – a beautiful, thin, modern font suited for all kind of creative design works. It’s also great for headlines: capital letters are with dots and points and lowercase are without them.
BONKERS
BONKERS was designed for headlines, poster, title, etc. It’s free for personal use. Commercial options and lowercase will follow in the future.
Caslon OS
Caslon OS is a recreation and a combination of the old Caslon typefaces in the style and interpretation of Alfredo Marco Pradil.
Ginebra
Hey Brother
Qanelas Soft: 3 Free font weights
This freebie contains UltraLight, Medium and ExtraBold weights that you can use for personal and commercial purposes, in accordance with the terms contained into the License Agreement that comes with the package.
Grotesk Light
Pifont
Reglo
Reglo Bold is a geometric Sans designed by Sebastien Sanfilippo. Reglo Bold was initially designed for the identity of Radio Panik with Open Source Publishing.
Mosk Typeface
Mosk is a typeface family that consist of lowercase letters and edited versions in the uppercase version, for your logos and designs.
Elder Display
Elder is a Transitional typeface with uppercase, lowercase, old style numbers and some punctuation.
Chau Philomene One
Simple
A new free font called Simple. I realized it inspired by great fonts and I tried to make it the more readable as possible, in simplicity. It has two weights: Regular and light.
Caja
Gen
Something Wild
It is a gorgeous handwritten font with a genuine wild spirit. Just the right thing for you if you want to add some raw feeling in your design! The font comes in all popular formats.
Kust
The new Kust free font is a handwritten typeface, written by Ieva Mezule, fashion designer and painter. 80 characters, every letter has a unique structure, with a distorted look. The letters were drawn on hard paper with a thick brush using pure black ink. The presentation was made by images taken by Krisjanis Mezulis, and the painting that’s in the middle was painted by Ieva.
Fibon Sans – Regular Weight Free
Fibon Sans is a balanced, low contrast, geometric and highly legible typeface well suited for any display or text use. Its curves make it a dynamic typeface, ideal for those who want to add modern touch to their compositions. Fibon Sans is an excellent choice for logotypes, magazines, blogs, presentations and many more.
Balans
Moderan
Cenotaph Titling
Cenotaph is an engraved-style titling face which draws reference from inscriptions done by Eric Gill – most notably in the vertical stem in the ‘U’. In OpenType format it contains 10 discretionary ligatures useful for stylistic and practical spacing purposes, as well as 3 alternate ampersands and proportional old style numerals.
Diapason
Amrak
Amrak is a slab serif created by Rômulo Gobira. Because of the bold appearence, Amrak is made to large headlines and advertisements but seldom used in body text. It comes in one style with +98 characters.
Sk-Modernist
Sk-Modernist is a minimalist and clean typeface which eschews complicated forms. The aim of the typeface was to create an amalgamation of a modern Grotesk, like Helvetica, with a simpler geometric style, like Avant Garde.
Sk-Modernist has been designed specifically for the digital age, each letterform being optically adjusted using a mathematical system rather than the traditional typographers eye. This approach has resulted in a typeface that displays exceptionally well in digital mediums.
Cloud Sans
Cloud, a humanist sans serif typeface with a bit of grotesque structure. Designed for all-purpose. Contains 5 weights with suitable italic. Light & Bold are available for free!
POE Sans Pro
Bender
The Bender font family was created in Russia specially for graphic designers. Thanks to the unique form of signs, fonts of the given family it is possible to type texts, to do logos or headings.
Ostrich Sans
Sheep Sans
Cabin
The Cabin Font is a humanist sans inspired by Edward Johnston’s and Eric Gill’s typefaces, with a touch of modernism. Cabin incorporates modern proportions, optical adjustments, and some elements of the geometric sans.
Pier
Pier is a modern and structured typography. The idea was to create a slightly off geometric font that would look as good big or very small. It was made to fit your everyday designs and text needs.
Moon
A new FREE rounded, simple, space-ie typeface family entitled Moon, with both thin and bold variations, free for personal use only.
Shihan
Shihan is a free typeface created in April 2015 and inspired by Bashkir geometrical ornaments. This is a FREE typeface and it’s authorized to use it for commercial works. Shihan is delivered in OpenType format and support basic Latin, Cyrillic and Bashkir character set.
Ailerons
Ailerons was inspired by aircraft models from the 40s. The typeface was designed for an experimental project of airmodels and now is available for personal use.
Viga
Viga is a sans serif with a good performance on screen. Its anatomy gives it a great personality and also makes it useful for reading on screen.
Nickainley Script
Nickainley is a Monoline Script font. handwriting font with a touch of classic and vintage. in uppercase, lowercase characters, numeral and punctuation. Can be used for various purposes, such as logos, badges, wedding invitations, t-shirts, letterhead, signage, labels, news, posters, badges etc.
Gen
Geomanist
Geomanist, a new sans serif font designed by atipostudio. download regular weight for free.
Mesmerize
Mesmerize is a low x-height sans-serif font family with 80 styles. There are 8 weights, 5 widths and italics. The capital I will automatically be replaced by a serifed I when followed by a lowercase l. In OpenType savvy applications, you can access old-style numerals, tabular lining numerals and tabular old-style numerals.
Keep Calm
Keep Calm is a family of fonts developed from the now famous World War 2 poster that was designed in 1939 but never issued, then rediscovered in 2000. As well as the original Keep Calm font, the Medium weight of the poster which can be downloaded free for personal use, three new weights are available from K-Type – Book (regular), Heavy and Light – and each comes with a complimentary Italic.
Leto Text Sans
Leto Text Sans is transitional sans-serif typefamily in 9 styles – 4 weights with italics and free Defect style.
Gidole
Gidole is an open source modern DIN created by Andreas Larsen in 2015. Currently only regular weight but more weights are in the pipeline along with full greek + cyrillic support.
Typo Slab
Modern Serif Eroded
Cathedral
Cathedral can be included in the group of transitional character, indicating the transition from the ancient to the modern Roman.
Chubby
Simply Rounded
Arkhip
Retro
Retro font family was designed as a result of love for typography and especially in the time of 20th century. As an experimental design, this font is given to public for free and for any use.
Blogger Sans
Blogger Sans was designed by Sergiy Tkachenko as the FirstSiteGuide’s custom typeface, created primarily for the use in headlines of the website. Blogger Sans draws inspiration from the clarity and legibility of the popular font Dosis with an additional support of the lost Cyrillic languages.
The bolder weights are lighter and softer. The following elements (-b-d-h-k-p-q-y-) are shorter, thus the headlines and subheads could be put in the dense line spacing. In addition the outline of the Blogger Sans is more smooth with better eligibility.
Fabfelt Script
Bakersfield
Bakersfield draws inspiration from 1920s geometric-style typefaces by having clean and highly legible forms constructing the type. The family is characterized by excellent legibility both in print and on the web, a well-finished geometric design, highly precise kerning.
The font’s various weights gives it the power to fit in any type of design, web, print, motion graphics, and make it perfect for headlines and corporate design via web and interaction design through to product design.
Althea
Althea is a ligature-free, modern upright cursive typeface with proportional lining figures.
Drugs font family
Fontfamily Drugs — fonts that are specifically designed for the pharmaceutical industry and for household chemicals. Than to make a text layout for package of any medicine, toothpaste or laundry detergent? The answer is — Drugs. Fontfamily has a range from thin to black font and can be used on any surface: paper, cardboard, metal, glass and others.
MAXWELL
MAXWELL is applicable for any type of graphic design. (web, print, motion graphics etc and perfect for headlines and logotypes/ wordmarks)
Mexe
A typeface designed for specific headlines, to comic books and the Cyrillic alphabet containing.
Espacio Novo
Uni Sans
Axis
Aventura
Montserrat
Often compared to Proxima Nova for its charming utility, Montserrat is a useful typeface, loved by many web and UI designers.
Rund-Grotesk
The Rund-Grotesk is a geometrical font with some typical classic shapes and characters. With its short descender and a large x-height it develops a special appearance. Especially the lower case letters support the classical look since some glyphs resemble old black letter typefaces.
The Rund Grotesk’s character set supports all central and some eastern european languages. Modern glyphs like the @ or the € symbol were added so it fits the todays usage. With three weights, light, medium and bold and furthermore the italics it works perfectly for headlines and small paragraphs.
Zona Pro
Zona Pro is a versatile geometric sans-serif type family of 8 weights plus matching italics. Zona Pro draws inspiration from 1920s geometric-style typefaces by having clean and highly legible forms constructing the type.
The heavier weights feature a slight variance in the stroke widths, resulting in a grotesque-ish and distinctive personality. Zona Pro has be designed to be an elegant, modern and multi-functional typeface that will preform equally as well in editorial settings as it does in display settings.
Groteskia
Aaram
Aaram is a unique font family, that comes in six gorgeous styles to choose from. Aaram primarily designed for screen but it’ll look fantastic in print too.
Rabiola
Cooper Hewitt
Cooper Hewitt, is a contemporary sans serif, with characters composed of modified-geometric curves and arches. Initially commissioned by Pentagram to evolve his Polaris Condensed typeface, Chester Jenkins created a new digital form to support the newly transformed museum.
Atletico
Eligible
Arkiv
Ahellya
Anders
Hanken
Mockup
Meticulous Ariel
Meticulous Ariel is a new typeface that inspired by the world of fashion. Meticulous Ariel Typeface should be in use by the most popular fashion magazines and super luxury brands.
Choosing the right font for your design project is crucial as it can change the whole image projected by the project to its viewers. Typography is an art that every designer has to master in order to be great at their work.
Some fonts give more serious feeling to a website/print material, others can look more funny, more for kids, more personal and every feeling can be emphasized by the art of typography. In fact, by themselves, the fonts can make the difference between a great design that clients will love and failure in delivering what they expected.
Fonts can also have an impact on the general look of a design; a website, for example, can look more classy or friendly solely based on how its writing is done. Since typography has such an important impact on their work, designers usually do pay a lot of attention to the fonts they use in all their designs.
There are so many different fonts available, though, that designers usually decide their favorites for usual situations and use the same group of fonts in all their designs. It is impossible for anyone to use every existing font, so that is a great way to deal with this challenge. However, new fonts are designed regularly so it becomes very hard to keep up with those new choices. Some of these new fonts could fall into the favorite set of designers if they knew they existed, since some of them can be deemed really appropriate in specific circumstances.