40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Geo Sans Light, by Manfred Klein
Nadia Serif by Nadia Knechtle, Quersicht )
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.
JustOldFashion
A font designed by Manfred Klein.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Scriptina
Handwriting, PC, Mac.
Mank Sans
A freefont designed by Manfred Klein.
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.
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.
Engel Light Ltd
Sans-Serif, PC, Mac, no special characters available.
Cicle
Sans-Serif, 7 weights, freeware.
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.
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).
[image via typoblog.ch]
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.
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.
AUdimat (v2)
OpenType, Mac, PC, in four weights: regular, italic, bold, bold italic. Freeware, via fontleech.
Greyscale Basic
A freefont designed by Greyscale [via Computerlove]
Existence Light
A free sans-serif font designed by Yeah Noah. 3 weights — Light, UnicaseLight, StencilLight. OpenType, PC, Mac OS X.
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]
Images from Typemotion.de
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.
Unibody is an optimized screen font family for Macromedia Flash MX and Adobe Photoshop. It’s designed for one point size only, 8 pts.
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.
Zamir
December 3rd, 2007 6:13 amThanks!…Excellent fonts!…
rid
December 6th, 2007 5:56 amthanks, will be sure to put some of these fonts to use during the holidays.
Keral Patel
December 6th, 2007 3:57 pmExcellent collection. I have always been frustrated when it came to choosing the right fonts. I had tried delicious and others from the authors site. But this new one “Scriptina” is the one I was looking for from so many months.
bao
December 7th, 2007 6:19 amHere’s a dumb question: How do I download the font?
alecs
December 8th, 2007 11:59 pmwell click on the name of the font and then look for the download button
Sebastian
December 12th, 2007 7:07 pmWhoa! ANother cool list of fonts! *downloading*
Resonate
December 14th, 2007 12:49 amExcellent thankyou for this it will be extremely useful in the near future
Joe
December 15th, 2007 4:28 amVery nice fonts indeed. Thanks for collecting the list; many of these were new o me at least.
It is unfortunate that you haven’t used the opportunity to educate font users as to the fundamental differences in the licenses behind these “free of cost” fonts. “Everything gold does not glitter” and everything free of cost is not free of restrictions. Some of these fonts are under “copyleft” or open licenses that would allow you (or anyone else) to distribute them, and some are not. Such open licenses are absolutely not public domain, as you imply, but do allow for unrestricted use while preserving the creative integrity of the work.
As it stands, your fine list propagates the misconception that “free of cost” is all that matters.
ZBWPJ
December 18th, 2007 7:55 pmI can recommend fonts:
Antykwa Poltawskiego http://open.font.pl/antykwa-poltawskiego/en/
and Iwona http://open.font.pl/kurier-i-iwona/pl/
Both fonts are free for commercial use.
Jaume
December 20th, 2007 7:46 amNice!
Thanks for sharing.
“What is your favourite?” It’s hard to say.. and it will depend on the use or the feel we need to comunicate.. But Fontin Sans is an excelent one, in my opinion.
uranther
December 24th, 2007 5:35 amThanks a lot for posting this list. It is what I have been looking for for years.
Brooklyn1
December 25th, 2007 11:48 amhow do you receive all of these free fonts???
is there a place to download them???
Cyrill
January 14th, 2008 11:16 pmPerfect fonts! Thanks for the recommendations) Do you have some fine TTY monospace ideas?
pdincubus
January 16th, 2008 3:37 ambrilliant collection of freebies, these are really helpful – i’ll be using them all the time! :)
Salman
January 17th, 2008 5:37 amNice, thanks for sharing. :)
raj
January 24th, 2008 3:07 amVery Very Cooooooool Collection! : )
Julie
January 24th, 2008 7:38 pmThanks for the great collection & I personally love that they were at their “home sites” as it gave me a chance to see the terms of use for each font.
lovetheson
January 26th, 2008 7:47 pmGreat collection of very useful fonts. Thanks!
propeller
January 29th, 2008 6:20 amthis is f*cking G.R.E.A.T! thank you!
gnoma
January 30th, 2008 8:18 pmvery coo fonts…download now.
Marta - Logotipos
January 31st, 2008 2:41 pmFantastic !!! thank you!
Will
February 5th, 2008 3:38 pmlove these fonts…thanks
bharat
February 11th, 2008 6:42 ama grat and corporate collection
Bryn
February 13th, 2008 11:28 amThe Delicious font is gorgeous. Actually, all the fonts available for download on that website are gorgeous. I’ve never been a fan of script fonts like Scriptina but this article has led me to some very nice, new fonts which I’m sure will be used often. Thank you.
Prabhu
February 14th, 2008 11:54 pmExcellent fonts!! Thanks a lot. They inspire me.
arnanda
February 17th, 2008 6:15 amwoooow, such a cool high quality font source to download.
you guys have done a great job! thanks to people @ SM, & especially to those genius fontographers, i love you all!
and there you still have people moaning about ‘repost’.
pfffiiuuhhh… can’t make everybody happy, eh lad? :)
Srilu Viene
February 18th, 2008 6:40 amThese are fantastic fonts! I totally lucked out in finding this page. Thank you so much for sharing with us!
Timothy Andrew
February 20th, 2008 9:36 pmThis list is priceless. Thank you.
annei
February 22nd, 2008 11:45 amo yea!!! all the stuffzz good.. keep it up
izzy
February 24th, 2008 4:02 amreally great stuff.
but i have a question guys.
i am a new user of photoshop and cant use these great fonts..
could you help me please!
Matthias N.
February 24th, 2008 9:13 amFantastic collection! Thanks for the great work!
matharchod
February 26th, 2008 11:00 amLOL I just might do that
mr.soft
February 28th, 2008 11:59 amGreat fonts here…. thanks a lot!!!
It would be much easier and quicker to download these if you made the links to the fonts open in a new tab/window instead of navigating away from this page.
Roger Omlid
February 28th, 2008 6:36 pmWho would think that fonts could be interesting and cool? Great work and Thanks.
Alex
February 29th, 2008 6:30 amAlso you can find the great collection of fonts here http://www.azfonts.net. Direct download.
matt
March 3rd, 2008 10:23 amgreat resource. fantastic. thank-you!
matt
Nick
March 3rd, 2008 2:42 pmThe links lead to the home pages of the providers because they are providing you something free of charge. Not only are you advertising your lack of care for their exposure, you’re virtually screaming ” I don’t appreciate it but I’ll use it anyways! “
Felicity
March 4th, 2008 3:42 pmOf the fonts above, the ones I like are MG Open Cosmetica and Scriptina. The rest are too “funny.” Other good free fonts? A.C.M.E. Explosive is the only good free comic book lettering font. Apple Garamond Light was great in the 1980s and early 1990s as the Apple corporate font and is still beautiful today, though they no longer use it. Katrina is a decent free Benguiat. November, PC Senior, Adore 64, and Amiga Forever are true “computer” fonts, not like the fake ones that people keep putting out. OCR A Extended is a good computer printer font. Pinewood is the best “log” font and quite pretty in its own right. Prestige is a useful typewriter font, though VTCorona is even better still. RSLaserLondon is the best calligraphy font. Stomper is the single best font to come out of the Chank group. And TopSecret is the best-looking “file folder” font.
Gustavo
March 6th, 2008 7:03 amExcelente !! muchas gracias, me bajé varias !!
iphone unlock
March 7th, 2008 2:48 amThis really is a fantastic post from information point of view. Thanks!
nikola
March 8th, 2008 10:47 amwicked! thank you so much for posting this collection of fonts! superb work, nicely and professionally presented.
Zaheb
March 12th, 2008 8:40 amBahout bahout Shukria! (many, many thanks — said in Urdu)
This is great stuff. The generosity & openness displayed by SmashingMagazine and its cohorts is frankly refreshing in this day and age!
All the best!
Dave
March 13th, 2008 11:50 amYou rock hard!!! thanks!
Christian Fischer
March 14th, 2008 4:18 amThese Fonts are superb and a great addition to every Graphic Designers Toolbox.
And please take the time and visit the Type Designers Website when you like their free font, as you can see these free font mostly as a teaser to even better material. don´t be lazy..there is a reward (sometimes even more free fonts :-)
Touist
docmorti
March 15th, 2008 10:00 amGreat collection! Sometimes this kind of stuff don’t have a really “pro feeling” but all these fonts are really amazing.
rajaraman
March 15th, 2008 4:04 pmreally its nice collection, Thank you very much
alex
March 18th, 2008 12:23 pmgreat listing, very good collection of fonts
Mr. Sifuentes
March 21st, 2008 6:55 pmthank you! very generous of you.
American River Rafting
March 21st, 2008 7:49 pmThis is the best collection of professional free fonts I have ever seen all in one place. I recently bought a disc with over 2000 fonts on it and none were as stylish as this collection. I need another post like this. Keep it up!!!
Infomorphosis
March 23rd, 2008 2:15 pmThanks for an excellent web site. I recently came across a reference to the Venturis font family. Venturis is based on Adobe’s Utopia font. Would Venturis qualify as an “excellent free font”? Here’s the URL:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/venturisadf/
Argelia
April 1st, 2008 2:58 pmGreat collection, thank you
Paul Mtz
April 6th, 2008 1:49 pmThank´s great stuff! I´m waiting more…
Bunker
April 8th, 2008 8:44 amreal nice
catpower3000
April 11th, 2008 12:50 amwonderful collection! thanks for doing all the job for me :]
Dave
April 11th, 2008 12:53 amthanks for the type collection. :)
Ricardo
April 13th, 2008 5:15 pmThanks for these great fonts! Look spectacular in presentations.
JT
April 16th, 2008 1:18 pmAH thanks, forever in my bookmarks…
Jaideep Patil
April 24th, 2008 3:17 ami’m never seen before like that fonts
viviana
April 30th, 2008 8:19 pmthis is my dreamsite, amazing fonts…thanks for share!!!
fluxo
May 9th, 2008 6:32 pmYeah I must agree with everyone else. These are very much appreciated and they are extra crisp! Thanks for doing this. Peace.
John
May 13th, 2008 11:37 amthanks for these fonts! you guys made my day
Slavi
May 23rd, 2008 11:55 pmWOW!!!
SO nice, thank you very, very much!!
YASMIN
May 24th, 2008 9:38 pmThank you for sharing!!!!
web design
May 24th, 2008 10:26 pmThats perfect!
THANKS A LOT SMASHING MAGAZINE :D
i love you :d
regards from turkey, mehmet
xerox
May 29th, 2008 1:39 amThank you so much. Very nice selection.
Paul
June 6th, 2008 8:04 amQuite simply an amazing list,
I got just about every one! :O
Ajay
June 12th, 2008 3:57 amThank you
Maricelle
June 12th, 2008 10:42 amGreat fonts! Classic and elegant. Thank you so much for sharing.
Bardia
June 16th, 2008 10:46 pmReally Great fonts and greate site for every artistic things.
Thank you so much for sharing this site.
Ayush
June 17th, 2008 8:35 ambrilliant collection. i’ll be using most of them in my future endeavors..
Valent
June 22nd, 2008 11:10 pmGreat post and very useful. I dare to bet that designers from all over the world will definitely make use of it.
Regards from Netherlands & Indonesia
Zaffri
June 30th, 2008 8:50 pmGreat page. Really nice font selections. Thank You
Camila
July 3rd, 2008 9:02 pmThank you guys your great,….!!!.
sense
July 15th, 2008 8:58 amBeautiful lines ..
Thank you ..
^_^
Manasa Malipeddi
July 16th, 2008 1:31 amLove the fonts, and the colours!! Thank you SmashMag!
AndriG
July 20th, 2008 8:12 amReally amazing fonts!!!
Thank u…..
Christine Macabuag
July 20th, 2008 4:26 pmThank for sharing. These are definitely quality fonts
T Cox
July 21st, 2008 2:23 pmAbsolutely wonderful….This site was a dream come true!
mc
July 23rd, 2008 8:09 amomg these fonts are fricken amazing. best day of my life. i’m gonna cry they’re so good. i love you guys. xoxo
Fernando Duque
July 27th, 2008 12:00 pmImpressive, very useful and each article helps me a lot, thank you very much for the valuable time spent on this site. Magnificent sources, extraordinary, Fontins Sans very interesting.
spacey
July 29th, 2008 5:13 pmWow, that’s impressive!
ferne
August 18th, 2008 1:16 amwell done. superb font!
Anxo
August 22nd, 2008 9:06 amThank you
Morten Poulsen
September 14th, 2008 8:42 amYou could also take a look at the beautiful Kontrapunkt font from the Danish design company of the same name.
Kontrapunkt Web Site
The download section is at the bottom to the right.
ade
September 14th, 2008 10:04 pmspeechless, greatt! love all this font
ali
September 19th, 2008 8:20 amoh very very good .
Rajagopalan
September 26th, 2008 3:19 amIncredibly interesting site. Excellent fonts
BK
October 1st, 2008 10:15 pmHi, these fonts are great. I am thinking of using some unique font for my site but my only concern is whether the font would appear correctly when others are browsing my site but they do not have the same font install in their pc. Does anyone here know how to overcome this challenge?
KoufaxR
October 3rd, 2008 2:30 pmWay cool. Thanks for posting. Fonts are so interesting to me.
Muhammad Nadeem
October 6th, 2008 4:31 amVery good collection…very useful as well…. thank you so much :)
flexor
October 6th, 2008 7:07 amgreat taste in selecting these fonts. knew already about half of them but the news ones are real pearls for free. thanks.
alanya haber
October 11th, 2008 1:16 amThanks for the resources
banda
October 11th, 2008 4:19 amhey dude plz… help me to download this fonts … i m not getting link
Raymond
October 14th, 2008 7:58 amReally good set of fonts. Thank you for posting.
bluedee
November 4th, 2008 6:32 pmwow….great fonts…thanks for sharing
jdaly23
November 5th, 2008 6:49 amThanks!
Farid Hadi
November 11th, 2008 6:55 amTasty! =)
Josh Drake
November 11th, 2008 8:55 amThis is a really great list! Many people are adamantly against free fonts, but I think that some free fonts (at least all of the ones on this list) are great to use professionally. Thanks!
Dahn Haven
November 14th, 2008 9:19 amI am taking a class in Designing logos and our assignment is to find quality typography and fonts. Thanks.
John Pitchers
November 16th, 2008 5:13 amI use Scriptina in my logo. Designed it about a year and a half ago. It was a cool, elegant, script font without being too feminine. But, now it’s everywhere! It’s so overused. Everytime I see it I think “How cheesy!”. Time to change my logo. Perhaps, I’ll search for a commercial font this time.