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Free Fonts Of The Month: Moderna, Mido, Liberation

By Smashing Editorial, October 19th, 2007 in Fonts | 66 Comments | Forum

Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

This month we can present you a dozen of them. It’s not quite clear if one is legally allowed to use MyriadPro (Bold, Semibold), Helvetica (Bold) and Humanist Gill 521 (Bold), which are also presented below. Please read the license agreement carefully - it can change from time to time.

You can find over 50 more free fonts in our section Fonts.

Free Fonts Of The Month: Moderna, Mido, Liberation

MG Open Moderna
MG Open Cosmetica
Mido
A limited test version. The full version will be released in 2008.
Templatesbox
This template includes .ttf-files of MyriadPro (Bold, Semibold), Helvetica (Bold) and Humanist Gill 521 (Bold).
Liberation Serif
Public domain / GNU GPL, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, PC / Mac OS X
Liberation Sans
Public domain / GNU GPL, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, PC / Mac OS X

Bonus

Jumpstart Package (thanks, Chris Apalodimas)

Available fonts:
- Kootenay™ regular (a sans serif design)
- Lindsey™ regular (a handwriting style design)
- Miramonte™ regular and bold (a sans serif design)
- Pescadero™ regular and bold (a serif design for text)
- Pericles™ light and regular (a sans serif inscriptional style design)
The Microsoft HD DVD Interactivity Jumpstart Package contains software and utilities to simulate, test and debug HD DVD applications. Ascender has licensed a set of OpenType (.TTF) fonts to Microsoft which are included in this package for developers to use and distribute on HD DVD discs.

The eight fonts were all designed by Ascender’s Type Director, Steve Matteson, for on-screen viewing and to showcase the advanced typographic features of OpenType.

This download is available to customers running genuine Microsoft Windows.

Published in Fonts, October 19th, 2007
Tags: Fonts, free, typeface, typography

1.

Anita (October 19th, 2007, 10:27 pm)

thanks guys!
this made my day!!!
2.

Dominik Porada (October 19th, 2007, 10:27 pm)

The bonus rocks. :)
3.

Barend (October 19th, 2007, 10:54 pm)

Thanks guys. Great for my webdesigns…
4.

wade (October 19th, 2007, 11:29 pm)

Great fonts, but what’s with the russian on the first link ?
5.

lawton chiles (October 19th, 2007, 11:47 pm)

you guys are awesome. I need to tell my readers about these fonts. Any suggestions as to whether or not they are good for print or screen?
6.

shnalla (October 20th, 2007, 12:05 am)

Delicious fonts, as usual!
7.

Peter (October 20th, 2007, 12:15 am)

I just used Mg Open Cosmetica for a poster design a couple weeks ago. I was working in Ubuntu (I normally work in Windows), and found this font. Apparently, it is standard with Ubuntu. I downloaded it for Windows - I like the set.
8.

BlueBear (October 20th, 2007, 1:50 am)

Really nice! I love them.
9.

simplr (October 20th, 2007, 1:51 am)

@wade, that’s Greek, not Russian. Apparently they have acces to the internet as well!
10.

Timothy Long (October 20th, 2007, 2:32 am)

JUST what i was looking for. RISPEK.
11.

Bram (October 20th, 2007, 5:33 am)

I’m loving the Mido font!
12.

Shaun (October 20th, 2007, 6:25 am)

Excellent, I love these fonts :D
13.

Jasper (October 20th, 2007, 7:46 am)

Nice to see some of these, but don’t you think it inappropriate to advertise the highly dubious redistribution of commercial fonts? (Myriad Pro, Helvetica, Gill)

You admit that the legality of using them is “not quite clear,” but these are obviously commercial fonts from major foundries — with licenses that undoubtedly do not allow them to be redistributed by third parties over the web. Of course, the template maker bears responsibility for including them in package, but should you encouraging this?
14.

Leonardo… from Colombia (October 20th, 2007, 10:51 am)

Thx a lot guys!!! Cool fonts!
15.

fearlex (October 20th, 2007, 12:13 pm)

I love the myriad font, i’m not sure if i can use it, thanks anyway :D
16.

Sarah (October 20th, 2007, 12:24 pm)

Beautiful fonts, but when I downloaded Moderna it does not look anything like what is displayed here. Any thoughts? I am using Windows.

The Mido is gorgeous - I wonder how much the full version will cost? The test version don’t have an apostrophe :-(
17.

Kate (October 20th, 2007, 3:56 pm)

Another fonts! Wow, Thanks to Vitaly and Sven.
18.

Mark (October 20th, 2007, 6:33 pm)

Absolutely Smashing!
19.

Ronin Snowboards (October 20th, 2007, 11:04 pm)

Lovely stuff. I’m really considering use of this Mido font for the headers on my website (with sifr of course)
20.

Kayzah (October 21st, 2007, 2:31 am)

Wow, look at the Modern-Font.
It’s a nearly perfect Helvetica-Klone:

Link [img147.imageshack.us]
21.

Angela (October 21st, 2007, 3:31 am)

Installed the Jumpstart package, but don’t see the fonts installed. How the heck do you get to them?
22.

Vishal Agarwala (October 21st, 2007, 3:38 am)

to good to be true. thanks!
23.

Say Hello Beard (October 21st, 2007, 8:52 pm)

Another great set of finds. Well done.
24.

Swift (October 21st, 2007, 8:54 pm)

Oh my goodness, those are really amazing fonts! Free and still so professional! Simply Amazing. Perfect
25.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (October 21st, 2007, 9:31 pm)

@Angela: if you’ve installed the package, take a closer look at the folders inside the folder “Jumpstart”. You’ll find the fonts there.
26.

zooloo (October 21st, 2007, 10:51 pm)

great basic fonts, Kootenay™ regular (a sans serif design) is a smooth and great looking font!
27.

Affan Imran (October 22nd, 2007, 7:21 am)

Just to let you know before you get in trouble MyriadPro is not a free font..you have to buy it, its owned by Adobe
28.

Xander (October 22nd, 2007, 9:17 am)

So, I’m loving Cosmetica and Mido… but I’m stuffed as far as trying to download the Jumpstart Package on my Mac? That’s a bit ordinary. Thanks for the others anyway, some real beauties.
29.

Ines (October 22nd, 2007, 4:17 pm)

Great … thank you!
30.

Bronson (October 22nd, 2007, 9:48 pm)

What’s the word on the legality of the Humanist font? I could replace it with one we’re licensing where I work, but I want to make sure it’s free. And there’s no readme with the template.
31.

grfx303 (October 23rd, 2007, 12:18 am)

Russian text when link followed- what is that about?
32.

grfx303 (October 23rd, 2007, 12:28 am)

Some of the links above go to URLs with Russian language, some go to ads for products that have nothing to do with fonts, some go to URL’s that play ‘hide the free font’. Look, I though you guys were far enough along in development not to do asshat ploys like this. If you want Diggs and Popurl to pick up your posts, at least have the courtesy not to direct folks to the working links.
Suggestion - make the free stuff you want at a download site like MediaFie that actually has the download and stop jerking people around like an asshat.
33.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (October 23rd, 2007, 1:52 am)

@grfx303: thanks for your comment. All links lead to the pages which include links to the presented fonts. We would never use Mediafire and similar services, because from the legal point of view we aren’t allowed to distribute these fonts by ourselves.

Our visitors are extremely important to us. We try to do our best in delivering quality content. However, we also respect the work of people offering these fonts for free and therefore we would never ignore their legal disclaimers.
34.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz (October 23rd, 2007, 1:54 am)

The links to MG Open Moderna and MG Open Cosmetica lead to a Georgian web-site; the links to .ttf-files are listed at the bottom of the web-site. Please scroll down there.
35.

James Richardson (October 23rd, 2007, 2:15 am)

I think these fonts are great and its wonderful to have someone kindly pick out the ‘best’ of the fonts out there. I think others should stop complaining about the link to ‘Myriad Pro’. Pretty much every good designer who has Adobe products has access to this font and if it were to be used professionally ‘of course’ there are bound to be licensing issues associated with this! So please stop attacking the author and be thankful for such an awesome site! Love the work here all at Link [www.smashingmagazine.com] :)
36.

Johan Linder (October 23rd, 2007, 1:31 pm)

Hi!
The Moderna page is in Greek. Select English at top right!
Anyone got a clue to get the MS fonts for the mac? Validation required…
37.

PvK (October 23rd, 2007, 5:43 pm)

A better place to download the bonus Ascender fonts is “Using OpenType Fonts Sample”.

Link [msdn2.microsoft.com]

It’s a self extracting zip file, so no installation is needed, unlike the Jumpstart HDDVD package.
38.

nadia (October 24th, 2007, 10:25 am)

I love Kootenay™ it’s so fresh and new, I was soo bored with Myriad but hey, that font is a must have. Great post as usual guys :-D
39.

Yogi (October 24th, 2007, 4:05 pm)

Great fonts, thank you for sharing it…
40.

solarium (October 25th, 2007, 3:01 am)

this makes me happy - thanks!!
41.

ChrisA (October 26th, 2007, 11:52 pm)

@PVK Please note that there are some differences from the set of fonts provided in the Jumpstart package and the OpenType fonts sampler package. Although all the fonts in both packages are .ttf. Some of the jumpstart fonts are TrueType whereas all the OpenType sampler fonts are OpenType.

I glanced through both sets of fonts, some of the HD-DVD fonts have extra characters (smaller versions of numbers 0-9). Which makes sense if you’re going to be using them for DVD display.
42.

PX (October 27th, 2007, 4:52 am)

Do your typography homework people - anything non latin based MUST mean more than “looks Greek to me” (cause it is :-D )
Start here Link [www.omniglot.com]
43.

sd (October 30th, 2007, 5:53 pm)

very nice typography set, thanks for the selection, really enjoyable.
44.

Matt McInerney (November 7th, 2007, 2:13 pm)

gotta love Myriad Pro
45.

Kiloherz (November 8th, 2007, 1:24 am)

Is it just me or the Cosmetica font is a clone of Optima?
46.

Leo (November 8th, 2007, 3:11 pm)

I have been following your free fonts series and they really help me a lot. Thank you very much for the beautiful fonts.

But I am still confused with the copyright issue of using the free fonts. Can I use the “free to download” fonts for my commercial works?

I wish Smashing Magazine could write an article about copyright issue of using font. Thank you.
47.

igtats (November 10th, 2007, 12:08 am)

Great Fonts, but how do I install ????
48.

Simon (April 11th, 2008, 4:49 am)

What are these “free” fonts?

It’s confusing when you see something labeled as “free”. From the above list, some fonts are “free and open-source”, which means you can also use for commercial work, among other liberties.

The font licenses that give you freedom include

GPL / GPL with exception (Liberation fonts)

“Bitstream Vera-style” license (MgOpen fonts)

Open Font License (OFL) (not shown here, see Link [scripts.sil.org] for full list)

and a few other misc “free and open-source” licenses.

With other fonts, you have to read carefully the license, so see what restrictions are in place.
49.

Dipendra Bhatt (June 11th, 2008, 1:22 am)

sooooooooooooooo tasty fonts, good job
50.

Ian Hutchinson (October 20th, 2008, 12:02 pm)

It’s nice to have some good free fonts under your belt. Especially when you want to legally design without having to cough up for loyalties and pay-fonts.