Free Fonts Cheat Sheet
We all love high quality typefaces, particularly those available for free download: as provided by typo-designers or typo-foundries. Over the last months we’ve collected over 50 of them and presented them in our Free Fonts Section, which is being updated on a regular basis. So if you haven’t downloaded these fonts yet, you probably should take a look at them right now.
However, 50 fonts are pretty much, so it would be nice to have some kind of quick reference for the best of them – to have them printed out and browse through them once you need to decide which font to use. Therefore we’ve decided to create a Free Font Cheat Sheet, which is basically a list of examples, which demonstrate, how the best high quality freefonts can be used for body copy.
We’ve also listed basic system fonts and Vista fonts in the list, so you can compare them if you’d like to. You can download the final .pdf (.zip, 0.8 Mb) for free. You can also use the Free Fonts Cheat Sheet Page if you have the fonts already installed on your PC.
Quick Overview
- Download Free Font Cheat Sheet (.zip, 0.8 Mb)
- visit the Free Fonts Cheat Sheet Page
- visit the Free Fonts Section. You can download all the fonts listed in the Cheat Sheet for free, using references in our articles.
We’d like to thank to all typo-designers and foundries for releasing these fonts for free. We appreciate your work and your intentions.
If you find any mistakes, problems or if you have any comments how we could improve the Cheat Sheet – let us know or just comment on this article. Please do not link directly to the .zip-file, but to this article. Please appreciate our work and time.
Yas V
April 25th, 2007 5:22 amvery kewl : ) ty
Deano
April 25th, 2007 5:24 amGreat summary … my only suggestion would be adding a web link to the location of the type foundry or type designers site
facu
April 25th, 2007 5:31 amjoya
szek
April 25th, 2007 6:05 amindeed, thanks to the typo-designers for the good work, and thank you for researching.
Robert
April 25th, 2007 6:12 amThank you 4 the feature. Nice work and thanx 2 all the font artists :-)
Daniel
April 25th, 2007 8:24 amYou guys should make a .zip with a collection of 50 fonts if you could. Such a pain to install each one :(
Ridikul
April 25th, 2007 8:25 amA font fan’s dream.
Sol
April 25th, 2007 8:58 amgreat!
criticalerror
April 25th, 2007 9:52 amanother goooooood article…
Adil
April 25th, 2007 10:21 amAwesome! I was actually thinking of compiling a similar resource from the great list of free fonts you had provided us =)
S:Mag, affecting your web.code addicted lives every day!
regul8or
April 25th, 2007 10:40 amI have just one suggestion. When you tell us about another great free font, could you please tell us which code pages it have? There’s usually no such information available, I’m downloading every single one you mention just to find out I will not be able to use it.
Jörg Petermann
April 25th, 2007 2:48 pmDer Link zur PDF auf der Cheat Seite erzeugt einen Fehler!
Ines
April 25th, 2007 5:32 pmGreat collection, very useful!
MrQwest
April 25th, 2007 5:48 pmYet another fantastic post.
To echo other people’s comments, it’d be nice for ‘Smashing Magazine’ to offer these fonts in one zip, but i understand that the foundry’s want the downloads from their own websites.
It’d be nice to find out where to download them though :)
Oh, and sorry to be picky but the ‘Free Fonts Cheat Sheet Page’ shows the old smashing magazine favicon for some reason :\
Keep up the goodwork!!!
karl
April 25th, 2007 6:36 pmthanks to the designers for the good work, and thanks for researching.
Robbie
April 25th, 2007 7:21 pmThank you 4 the feature. Nice work and thanx 2 all the font artists :-)
Famous Photos
April 25th, 2007 8:00 pmdo you know what we could really use? an online .pdf with the fonts with links to download page (or smashing magazine page where we can find them)…
.zip is so… web 1.0 :P
DonLuco
April 25th, 2007 10:39 pmAwesome. I know I can always trust you guys to hook me up.
Question though…how does one go aboout making a nifty little cheat sheet like that? Very simple…does the job.
Kathy
April 25th, 2007 10:48 pm.zip? Really now. The 200K you saved by zipping this PDF isn’t worth the time it takes to unzip it and open it. How about just linking to the PDF page?
(BTW, I reduced the PDF 125K by opening it in Acrobat Pro and saving it… the Ghostscript engine you’re using apparently doesn’t optimize.) Thanks for the samples!
Paul Irish
April 25th, 2007 11:19 pmI request a zip of all the free fonts so far, please!
Gegenton
April 26th, 2007 3:30 amAwesome. I love typefaces :>
Thanks for this great overview, just downloaded it :)
Marc
April 27th, 2007 3:52 pmA very nice overview, I didn’t know there were so many good free fonts!
Some more free typefaces, mainly Greek but some also have a latin character set: the Greek Font Society
lawton chiles
April 28th, 2007 4:37 amSmashers- Thanks very very very much for all the hard work you put into this. It is appreciated, not just b/c I can link to the story for my blog, but because these fonts keep people inspired and put cash in our wallets from jobs.
So, Thanks!
Lawton Chiles
Carlos Eduardo
May 3rd, 2007 10:33 pmThank you for this cheat sheet…
I think it will help us a lot when we want to use a quality font without paying for it :)
Mike
November 4th, 2007 3:16 amThanks for the info. A designer can never have too many fonts.
Novo
April 25th, 2011 2:43 pmIch merke gerade in diesem Moment dass ich diese Seite deutlich mehr aufrufen sollte ;-) – da kommt der Leser wirklich auf krasse Ideen
Book of Ra Tricks
May 5th, 2011 1:00 pmUnglaublich! Das hatte ich gar nicht gedacht :-)