Some great free and not-so-free font sites.

Posted on July 14, 2010 by ellen

It’s easy to find free fonts all over the web, but many free font sites are packed with eccentric font faces only useable in ransom notes or ’80’s grunge band logos. It’s very hard to sift through them for usable fonts with the spacing, design and legibility we used to expect from traditional font foundries.

While completing a recent design project, I found several sites that deliver only high-quality font sites. Some specialize in free fonts, others are mostly for-purchase, with a few free samples that are nonetheless worth mentioning.

The advent of @font-face means we can soon start expecting the same quality typography in web that is available in print. While cloud-based solutions (fonts.com, typekit, etc.) for commercial font licensing issues are starting to show up, there are also some opensourced web fonts out there that you can download and start using today for free on your sites.

MyFonts.com

My first choice for great fonts is not a free font site, but it does offer selected font cuts for free. MyFonts is a very high quality font shop run by Bitstream, that makes selected cuts from various font-families available at no charge.

This page lists all their free fonts.

Of course MyFonts.com is hoping that the free samples get you interested in purchasing the rest of the font family, and since their prices are quite reasonable, you may find yourself doing just that.

Where MyFonts really shines is in the many ways you can search for fonts, and the work they have put into carefully categorizing and tagging all their fonts. They also offers an amazing online utility called “WhatTheFont” that will examine your uploaded typographic image and find the closest matches to it in their database. You can even submit type samples directly from your iPhone using their native app.

MyFonts.com