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6 min.Fontshare
Fontshare is a website where you can download fonts totally free, launched by Indian Type Foundry (ITF). They offer a 100% free collection for both personal and commercial use.
Between 2014 and 2016, it launched several open source fonts, such as the popular Poppins, as well as Khand, Rajdhani, Hind and Teko. It has also invested a large part of its resources in developing fonts for rare or endangered languages, although from a commercial point of view it is not very profitable.
One out of every four Latin font families designed by ITF will be published through Fontshare and offered free of charge. Its goal is to help brands and individuals who do not have the budget but want access to a quality, technically sound typeface.
In addition to ITF’s own fonts, Fontshare also distributes free fonts from other publishers. They select the best open source fonts, check their quality, if they identify any technical or design errors they correct them and publish them on Fontshare.
Its interface offers a preview option that allows you to see how the text will look like with each font, being able to customize the content of both the title and the first paragraph, which will make your decision easier.
Collletttivo
Collletttivo is an open source type foundry founded in 2017 in Milan formed by a team of young professionals with different backgrounds and specializations in the fields of design and typography that promote the practice of font design through sharing and collaboration.
They function as a hybrid between a typographic incubator and a design studio. Whether you are a student or an agency, they offer expert advice to get your project off the ground.
They believe in open source as a tool for equal sharing, open access and collaboration. They have selected and developed custom-made resources that will help those who want to take their first steps in the world of typography to start learning font design.
Uncut
Uncut offers font downloads through its free font catalog, which focuses on contemporary fonts and currently has 162 fonts.
Fontsquirrel
Fontsquirrel offers a good catalog where you can download free fonts for commercial use. As it is a collection of external fonts, it is advisable to read first the license conditions under which each one works. Some licenses may allow more uses than others:
- Desktop use – To create business graphics and documents.
- @font-face – To embed fonts in web sites with CSS.
- Ebooks and PDF – For embedding in Ebook files and portable documents.
- Apps – For embedding in apps and software.
It also offers the option to identify a font from an image or to generate files and code needed to embed a font in a website.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is one of the most interesting resources in matters of typographic fonts. It is a directory where you can find a large collection of fonts for free use and completely free. These fonts can be used in any web project, from a web page to mobile applications, or in any design we need (brochures, posters, presentations…).
It is a catalog of high quality open source fonts. You can use its search engine that has many options to find the font that best fits.
It is possible to download the web fonts to a local storage for personal use and include them in our projects or copy the code provided to include the fonts in a web project.
Dafont
The catalog offered by Dafont is very wide, but it has the handicap of offering fonts of dubious quality. I would not use it to search for typography intended for web or editorial use, personally I use them when I am looking for a more expressive typography to use in the design of a specific poster.
The fonts presented on this website are property of their authors, with freeware, shareware, demos or public domain licenses. For more details it is advisable to look at the “Readme” files attached to each download or go to the author’s website.
Points to consider when download a free typeface
When downloading a free typeface we may encounter some kind of handicap that better take into account to avoid possible mishaps. Below you will see the most important points to consider if you decide to work with a free typeface.
Multilingual support
Puedes encontrarte con la situación que al usar una tilde o la letra “ñ” la tipografía no cuenta con soporte para este tipo de glifos más específicos de otros idiomas. Por eso es importante comprobar que la fuente tipográfica cuenta con soporte para diferentes alfabetos si trabajas con varios idiomas (latino, cirílico, griego, etc.).
You can find that when using an accent mark or the letter “ñ,” the font doesn’t support these types of glyphs, which are more specific to other languages. Therefore, it’s important to check that the font supports different alphabets if you work with multiple languages (Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, etc.).
You can check this by accessing the catalog of available glyphs when downloading a font. Use a tool like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign and test special characters. If you don’t have these tools, many of the websites where you can download fonts for free offer the option to run test runs to visualize the results.
Correct kerning and spacing
Kerning (adjusting the space between pairs of letters) and tracking (overall spacing) should be optimized to avoid irregular spacing, such as letters that appear too close or far apart.
You can verify this by trying combinations like “AV”, “To”, “Wa”, “YA” with tools like FontForge or Glyphs.
Weights and typographic variants
A font usually offers at least the following variants and weights: Regular – Bold – Italic – Italic Bold.
It is advisable to have other weights such as Thin, Semibold and Extrabold depending on the use we are going to give it.
Categoría/s: Graphic design
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