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40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

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The importance of typography in design can’t be overestimated. The accuracy, precision and balance of geometric forms can give letters the elegance and sharpness they deserve. Besides, elegant fonts can help to convey the message in a more convenient way. In fact, while there are many excellent professional fonts (we’ve presented some of them in our article 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design) there are literally thousands of free low-quality fonts which you would never use for professional designs.

Quality costs. The price of “bulletproof” fonts usually reflects their quality and starts at 50$ per typeface. However, before purchasing a font you will probably use only once in your designs you might want to take a glance at outstanding free alternatives first.

Over the last year we’ve been observing typo-designers and their works; we’ve regularly collected high-quality fonts available for free download and free to use for personal or/and commercial projects. In this article we’d like to present an overview of over 40 excellent free fonts you might use for your professional designs in 2008. What is your favourite?

Please notice:

  • Some images are taken from Gerrit van Aaken’s Typography Essays. Thank you, Gerrit.
  • We haven’t listed Arial, Georgia, Verdana, Trebuchet MS & Co. as well as Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Constantia and Corbel as they are delivered almost “automatically”.
  • You can visit the Free Fonts Section to find more free fonts. The category is regularly updated.
  • We’d like to thank to all typo-designers and foundries for releasing these fonts for free. We appreciate your work and your intentions.
  • Before using fonts please read the license agreements carefully — they can change from time to time.

Excellent Freefonts For Professional Designs in 2008

Gentium
Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. Gentium examples.

T06 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

T05 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

District Thin
A very calm, serious and impressive sans-serif free font from GarageFonts’ District family. The font is available as Mac Postscript, Mac TrueType, PC Postscript, PC Truetype and OpenType.

Dupont in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

MG Open Moderna

Moderna in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Pigiarniq Inuktitut font
Have you ever known about the existence of Nunavut? A small region in Canada with one of the lowest population rate of the world? Probably not. Only 0,01 people live there per km2, mostly Eskimo. The citizens of Nunabut speak four languages — French, English, Innuinaqtun and Inuktitut. Nothing spectacular so far, right?

Few years ago the government of the region has decided to design a new typeface to enable its 28.000 citizens to use all four languages in a uniform manner. The result is a beautiful, rich and professional sans-serif free font. The family includes a bold, heavy, italic, light and regular weights. Examples.

Pigiarniq in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Pigi2 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Delicious
Special attention was given to character spacing to obtain a homogenic appearance. With it’s relatively large x-height the Delicious can be used for text in smaller point sizes. The Delicious italic is not a slanted roman, but a true italic. Serif, Mac / PC.

Deliciousmain in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

T04 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

T03 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Anivers
A robust and rigid font, forgiving, flexible, elegant and also suitable for a broad use: from a stationery to a poster headline. A smashing serif freefont by Jos Buivenga, dedicated to the One-Year-Anniversary of Smashing Magazine. Besides ligatures, contextual alternatives, fractions and oldstyle/tabular numerals Anivers also has a ‘case’ feature for case sensitive forms. Anivers supports CE languages and Esperanto. It has more than 350 glyphs and over 1.600 kerning pairs. Examples.

Anniversary in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Anivers in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Tallys
Tallys is a font that is one degree slanted and has large caps, a small x-height and long ascenders. Only roman style is available.

Tallys in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Ta1 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Mido
A limited test version. The full version will be released in 2008.

Midostf in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Fontin Sans
Available weights: regular, italic, bold, bold italic and small caps. It is a sans companion of Fontin and can be downloaded at Mac & PC (OpenType). Fontin Sans is absolutely free for personal and commercial use. Examples.

Fontin-sans-1 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Fontin-sans-0 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

MG Open Cosmetica

Cosmetica in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Geo Sans Light, by Manfred Klein

Fresh-fonts-02 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Nadia Serif by Nadia Knechtle, Quersicht (see section “Labor”, SlabSerif, PC, Mac, via dersven.de)

Nadiaserif in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Yanone Kaffeesatz
This “coffee”-font is supposed to be used in headlines and brief text passages; it shouldn’t, however, be used for body copy. The numbers and currency signs are monospaced, which means that they have the same width. This is useful if you’d like to place them on a restaurant menu beneath each other in a table. The alternative and historic symbols as well as ligatures can be activated via the OpenType-option »optional ligatures«. Released under Creative Commons license. Examples.

Yanone in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Kaffee in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

JustOldFashion
A font designed by Manfred Klein.

JustOFashion in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Lido STF
The typeface is suitable for all periodicals wishing to abandon inconspicuously the hideous system typefaces with their even more hideous accents and to change over to the contemporary level of graphic design. It is also most convenient for everyday work in text editors and office applications. It has a fairly large x-height of lower case letters, shortened serifs and simplified endings of rounded strokes. Lido STF examples. For professional use you need a valid license which means purchasing the font.

T07 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Cardo
Cardo is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists. This font is free for personal, non-commercial, or non-profit use. Examples.

T08 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Day Roman
In digitizing this typeface, attention was mainly given to duplicate the technical imperfections of 16th century printing, which have been lost with today’s technologies. In order to accomplish this, some digital type design conventions have been avoided – things like the uniformity of the serifs, overall stroke precision, vertical proportion exactitude. This digitization should work nicely when used anywhere from 10 to 30 pt. Some design oddities, appealing or otherwise, may appear in 30+ pt usage. This serif-font is available in PC Type 1 and PC True Type formats. Examples.

Dayroman in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Day in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Liberation Serif
Public domain / GNU GPL, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, PC / Mac OS X

Libserif in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Liberation Sans
Public domain / GNU GPL, Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, PC / Mac OS X

Libsans in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Romeral offers aside from optimal legibility an elegant style, rounded forms and sharp geometric structure of its letters. Romeral is designed to produce a noticeable visual impact that invites the audience to the reading due to its sizable thickness. Interestingly enough, the basic idea of this OpenType-font was to find a way to fill the color titles zone in order to create a comfortable atmosphere for the reading experience. It can be used for body copy and headlines. Free to use in personal and commercial projects.

You can get the font sending a personal request via e-mail or comment form. More information is available on Typies, Pablo De Gregorio’s blog.

Romeral in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Romeral Small in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Scriptina
Handwriting, PC, Mac.

Scriptina in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Mank Sans
A freefont designed by Manfred Klein.

Fresh-fonts-00 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Chúcara
To get the font, contact the designer Juan Pablo De Gregorio or add a comment to the post, explaining, who you are, why are you willing to get the font and how do you intend to use it. The author sends the font via e-mail.

Freefont-004 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Qlassik

Qlassik-specimen in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Diavlo
Jos Buivenga’s freefont that is a bit square and sharp. Great attention has been given to detail, spacing and kerning. It contains more than 300 glyphs and over 1.300 kerning pairs. So Tørwald can pick up his Téléphone without worrying. Diavlo contains (some) East European characters and also Esperanto characters.

The final release contains 5 weights: Light, Book, SemiBold, Bold and Black. Diavlo contains a bunch of ligatures and contextual alternatives (OpenType feature) to prevent undesired collisions.

Fresh-fonts-07 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
Fresh-fonts-08 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
Fresh-fonts-09 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Engel Light Ltd
Sans-Serif, PC, Mac, no special characters available.

Engellight in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Cicle
Sans-Serif, 7 weights, freeware.

Free-high-quality-fonts-01 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Kontrapunkt
Slab-serif. Kontrapunkt was awarded the Danish Design Prize for best typeface. The aim has been to develop a distinct font, with regards to both the inidividual character and the overall image as such. The typeface has so far been developed in a light, light italic and bold version.

Kontrapunkt in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

FF Good Wide Light
The frefont offered by FontFont.com.

Goodwidelight in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Ff-good in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Fontin
The Fontin is designed to be used at small sizes. The color is darkish, the spacing loose and the x-height tall. The numbers of the Fontin have a ‘hybrid’ design. They carry the characteristics of medieval numbers, but their size is larger than the x-height. Mac (Type 1), PC (TTF, Opentype).

T00 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

T01 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Colaborate

Colaborate in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Freefont-001 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
[image and reference via typoblog.ch]

FF Mt
Erik Spiekermann’s most economical typeface ever. Employing obscure but powerful techniques like vwl mmssn and cap reduction, FF Mt uses up to 50% less paper, screen, and wall space than other text faces without a single condensed letter. OpenType.

Free-high-quality-fonts-02 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Fertigo
It’s a bit like Laphroaic; the more you get to know it, the more you’ll (probably) appreciate it. With it’s auto-ligatures (no Open Type programms needed), a complete character set and many other unknown features it can be hard to resist. Regular only.

Fertigo1b in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Fertigo in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Steiner
This typeface is ideal for logos and general design. It isn’t very suitable to be used with word-processors as it lacks some symbols and letters. Sans Serif, free for personal use only.

Free-high-quality-fonts-04 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

AUdimat (v2)
OpenType, Mac, PC, in four weights: regular, italic, bold, bold italic. Freeware, via fontleech.

Audimat in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Greyscale Basic
A freefont designed by Greyscale [via Computerlove]

Fresh-fonts-03 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Existence Light
A free sans-serif font designed by Yeah Noah. 3 weights — Light, UnicaseLight, StencilLight. OpenType, PC, Mac OS X.

Free-high-quality-fonts-05 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Lacuna
To download the font enter the Flash page, click on “Glashaus Fonts” in the navigation menu at the top, in the opened page click on [MAC] or [PC] in the left menu to download the font. [via Typemotion.de]

Lacuna in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Lacuna Reg in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Lacuna Italic in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Images from Typemotion.de

Com4T Fine Regular

Com4tfineregular in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Pixel fonts

Style-Force Semplice Pixelfonts
Tiny pixelfonts, Flash-compatible including detailed instructions on how the fonts should be used to achieve the best readability.

Pixelfonts1 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Pixelfonts2 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Unibody
Unibody is an optimized screen font family for Macromedia Flash MX and Adobe Photoshop. It’s designed for one point size only, 8 pts.

Fresh-fonts-06 in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Silkscreen
Silkscreen is best used in places where extremely small graphical display type is needed. The primary use is for navigational items (nav bars, menus, etc.). Silkscreen also works very well at large point sizes if you’re looking for that chunky, old school computer look so popular with the kids today. Created by Jason Kottke. Silkscreen, with both Mac and Windows versions, is free for personal and corporate use. TrueType, Windows, Mac, Linux.

Silkscreen in 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design

Vitaly Friedman, editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine (www.smashingmagazine.com), an online magazine dedicated to designers and developers.

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  1. 251
    bro
    May 20th, 2009 1:46 pm

    anybody know how to get >>MG Open Cosmetica

  2. 252
    AO
    May 21st, 2009 7:41 pm

    I can’t download “MG Open Cosmetica”

  3. 253
    Stu
    May 22nd, 2009 12:57 am

    Beautiful collection of fonts – nice work!

  4. 254
    kamikazee
    May 26th, 2009 9:31 pm

    does anyone tried to download Fertigo font? it says its free u have just to register in order to download free but after I got there on the link there is no download button for this font. any idea?

  5. 255
    pink
    June 5th, 2009 11:22 am

    Very nice collection! Thanks a lot !

  6. 256
    Gillian
    June 5th, 2009 10:05 pm

    You guys rock! Thanks these are awesome!

  7. 257
    npdv
    June 7th, 2009 12:11 am

    Hi.. I try to download Modena, but I think the link is wrong, so I found this, so anyone try to download Mgopen.Modena try this link:
    http://www.ellak.gr/pub/fonts/mgopen/index.en.html

  8. 258
    siddu
    June 9th, 2009 3:00 am

    great collection

  9. 259
    Kyle
    June 9th, 2009 10:09 pm

    Absolutely priceless collection. Thanks

  10. 260
    Cristi Marin
    June 10th, 2009 3:57 am

    very cool

  11. 261
    Lauren
    June 12th, 2009 1:04 pm

    Cosmetica is lovely!

  12. 262
    thua
    June 30th, 2009 7:00 pm

    Wonderful. Thanks a lot.

  13. 263
    Ingo
    July 1st, 2009 4:01 am

    Cool.
    Thanks for sharing!

  14. 264
    Andy D
    July 26th, 2009 3:16 am

    What a great magazine…. I wondered whether anyone could point me in the direction of a Disney-type font though? I am deigning for a small village children’s playgroup, doing it free of charge so wondered if there were any Disney-style fonts around which were free or as near it as poss?

    Cheers
    Andy

  15. 265
    Teri
    July 27th, 2009 3:59 pm

    Bummed that District Thin is no longer a free font. Had the perfect use for it!

  16. 266
    Munish Kumar Sachdeva
    August 9th, 2009 8:50 am

    Wow, this is a really good fonts.

  17. 267
    gsoli
    August 25th, 2009 9:32 pm

    Man, I bookmarked this at work over a year ago and somehow forgot about it. Just now getting around to downloading these. There are some really amazing fonts in here that I cannot believe are free!

  18. 268
    Eloise
    August 31st, 2009 1:36 am

    beautiful fonts!! I loved them!

  19. 269
    Yann
    September 2nd, 2009 5:21 am

    Hum hum… a lot of them just look like an exact copy of existing fonts:
    Moderna = Helvetica, Cosmetica = Optima, Geo Sans Light = Century Gothic, Day Roman = Caslon, Scriptina = Zapfino, and so on…

  20. 270
    broSKL
    September 3rd, 2009 2:08 pm

    thank you for sharing, good job yo.. i will download it.

  21. 271
    Trina
    September 9th, 2009 11:58 am

    Thanks for sharing, I’ve got a project & I’m new to some of the art I need to learn – this should help.

  22. 272
    Knox
    September 22nd, 2009 6:11 am

    Thank you so much! I really love this list of fonts. I have to say these are the best fonts that everyone should have! Really recommend this post and i definitely have bookmarked your site :)

  23. 273
    dobdob
    September 22nd, 2009 6:57 am

    Indeed a gorgeous collection. Since these are free fonts, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to find them (especially Scriptina) in a zillion projects. Fonts like Delicious, Chucara and Fertigo are more subtle than Scriptina (which I’ve used once two years ago and deleted from my system ever since…) and therefore less “noticeable”.

  24. 274
    Elyse
    September 30th, 2009 12:56 pm

    I am extremely impressed with the quality of these fonts. O SO CLEAN, but incredibly personal! Awesome is all I have to say.

  25. 275
    amrit virk
    September 30th, 2009 10:22 pm

    thanks for such good fonts.. :)

  26. 276
    veeshan
    October 1st, 2009 4:13 am

    These are great stuffs!! Would help a lot!!
    Thanks guys!!!

  27. 277
    Physics toys
    October 27th, 2009 1:57 am

    I like Sriptina, thank for sharing

  28. 278
    creativebrain
    November 2nd, 2009 1:24 am

    great fonts…

  29. 279
    chris
    November 18th, 2009 4:41 pm

    wew..nice font…

    thanks for shared..:D

  30. 280
    maya miller
    November 19th, 2009 10:16 am

    Great Collection.. I will try these for my web clients

    Thanks Dear

    Love..


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