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Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

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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.

In this selection we’re glad to present you Calluna, Andika Basic, Mentone, Sovereign Regular, Medio, Tiresias Infopoint and many other high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.

Small-book in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

You can learn more about typefaces and typography in our upcoming Smashing Book ($23.99 – available worldwide). Pre-order now and save 20% off the price!

New Free Fonts For Your Design

Calluna (only Calluna Regular is free)
The Calluna family, designed by talented Jos Buivenga, who has released 9 free fonts already, comes in 8 fonts: Light, Regular, Regular+Italic, Semibold+Italic,Bold+Italic and Black. Calluna is a text typeface with flow. upports a very wide range in languages and is a very complete OpenType typeface. Each font counts 723 glyphs. You can find detailed info on he character set and the OpenType features in the Calluna PDF specimen.

Call1 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Call2 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Andika Basic (only Thin is available for free)
Andika is a sans serif, Unicode-compliant font designed especially for literacy use, taking into account the needs of beginning readers. The focus is on clear, easy-to-perceive letterforms that will not be readily confused with one another. The family supports the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement Unicode ranges, plus a selection of the more commonly used extended Latin characters, with miscellaneous diacritical marks, symbols and punctuation. Released under the Open Font License.

Andika in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Mentone (only Semi Bold and Semi Bold Italic are free, registration required)
Mentone is a new general purpose typeface, an attempt at extending the line of the great sans-serifs of the previous century, Frutiger – Stone Sans – Myriad. The font has round corners and subtle chamfers, which are all but invisible at text sizes, but add an upbeat, irreverent expression at display sizes (via Chris Apalodimas).

Mento in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Tiresias Infopoint
Tiresias Infofont has been designed for use on information labels to help improve legibility. The characters and letterforms have been designed to provide maximum legibility at a reading distance of around 30 to 100 cm. The Tiresias™ family of fonts are now free to download, subject to the licence agreement (via Fontsquirrel).

Tiresias in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Sovereign Regular
Sovereign is a legible, original serif family from G-Type’s Nick Cooke. Available for PC (TrueType, PostScript) and Mac.

Sova in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Medio (download link)
An antiqua font with 99 glyphs and beautiful geometric forms. Available only in the OpenType format (dersven.de

Medio in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Sedona Script
A unique flowing script font with old-style numerals, beautiful ligatures and fancy capitals.

Sedona in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Ripe
Ripe was designed to be a practical typeface. Each character is distinct, yet consistent. Its subtle differences are clear enough to be easily read at both high and low resolutions, perfect for print, web and screen media. It is a geometric Postmodern slab seriffed face. The serifs feature simplistic rounded terminals and its stroke is uniform (via Creattica Daily).

Ripe in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

CP Mono Beta
The Font is a mono spaced and caps-only (as the original) with weights from thin to black. As a typographic experiment, every character should fit in the same square, vertically too. Diacritics and ascenders had to come down and later, when I decided to add lower case letters, descenders up. A variant with shortened descenders became a stylistic set and another set straightens angles in letters like A, K or V (via imjustcreative).

Mono in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Days Typeface
An original display typeface meant for use in large sizes; it works effectively in headlines with capital letters. The font contains basic Latin and Cyrillic letters and includes all numbers and main symbols. Available in the OpenType format for PC and Mac (via imjustcreative).

Days in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Tiza
Tiza is an informal chalk font, available for free download and use in private and commercial projects (via Creattica Daily).

Chalk in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

FF Dagny Thin (only Thin is available for free)
A clean and beautiful grotesk font with a light weight. A good font for advertisements, web typography and brochures.

D in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Pinvoke Pixel Fonts
A collection of quality pixel fonts that can be used free for any personal or commercial projects. Base size: 8 points / Tracking (Photoshop): 0, 125, 250… / Smooth edges (super pixel font)

Pinvoke in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Reminder: Download fonts from our previous posts

Chunk Open Source Typeface [ Download the .zip-package ]
Chunk is an ultra-bold slab serif typeface that is reminiscent of old American Western woodcuts, broadsides, and newspaper headlines. Used mainly for display, the fat block lettering is unreserved yet refined for contemporary use. OpenType. Designed by Meredith Mandel. (via Graham Smith).

Chunk1 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Chunk2 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Titilium [ Download the .zip-package ]
A very legible, beautiful academic typeface that perfectly fits to every corporate identity design, magazines and headlines of corporate web-sites. The typeface is available in various weights: text version, title version, extra-black version and full-version.

Tit in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Tit in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Rough Draft Regular
A legendary TrueType typeface by Harold Lohner. Contains 189 characters in 9 ranges. For $5 you can buy the complete set which includes separate Outline, Clean Fill, and Solid Fill fonts.

Rough in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Nilland
A beautiful slab-serif typeface, designed by Manfred Klein. The family consists of 6 weights, regular, bold, extra bold, black, small caps and small caps bold (link and images via DerSven.de).

Nilland in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Aller Sans [ Specimen | License | Download ]
Dalton Maag design team designed a beautiful sans-serif Aller Sans, sponsored by Danish publishing company Aller (hence the name). The typeface was designed as part of the Danish School of Media and Journalisms new CI and is now available for free use and download (via).

Allersans in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

M+ Outline
These fonts are free software. Unlimited permission is granted to use, copy, and distribute it, with or without modification, either commercially and noncommercially. Designed by Morishita Coji. The fonts are regulary updated, work in progress. Caution: Japanese language.

Mplus in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Goudy Bookletter 1911
A serif old-style OpenType font. You need to scroll the frame to find the download link. [via derSven]

Goudy in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Andale Mono
Andale Mono is a highly legible monospaced font which was originally distributed as part of the Internet Explorer 4.0 add-ons page as Monotype.com. It distinguishes well between the zero, and the O. You can find 4 further monospaced fonts in Hamish Macpherson’s article The Typography of Code.

Andalemono in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs
Credits: Hamish Macpherson

Junction [ Download the .zip-package ]
Designed by Caroline Hadilaksono, Junction is a humanist sans-serif typeface. It has elegant, clearn and very sharp glyphs, but contains only 100 most common symbols. Like Gentium it perfectly fits to body copy, but can also show its strengths, balance and beauty in headlines. Here are some insights from the designer:

Junc1 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Junc3 in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Vegur
This humanist sans-serif family is available in OpenType-format in three weights: ExtraLight, Regular and Bold. The typeface can be perfectly used both in body copy and in headlines.

Vegur in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

Further Resources

  • 45 Outstanding Free Vintage Fonts
    Harness the power of the antique and make your graphics pop with one of these vintage-inspired fonts, which have returned to the spotlight both in print and online. From the Wild West and Victoriana to the Avant Garde and Calligraphy, there are plenty of styles to choose from.
  • Top 10 Programming Fonts
    Here’s a round-up of the top 10 readily-available monospace fonts for your coding enjoyment, with descriptions, visual examples and samples, and download links for each. The round-up features Courier, Andale Mono, Monaco, Profont, Monofur, Proggy, Droid Sans Mono, Deja Vu Sans Mono, Consolas and Inconsolata.
  • 45 Useful Free Handwritten Fonts
    A couple of really beautiful hand writing-fonts that can give your site a more personal, individual touch.
  • Fontex.org
    A growing collection of free fonts.
  • Fontsquirrel
    Another growing collection of free fonts.

Small-book in Beautiful New Free Fonts For Your Designs

You can learn more about typefaces and typography in our upcoming Smashing Book ($23.99 – available worldwide). Pre-order now and save 20% off the price!

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

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  1. 1
    Jack
    August 7th, 2009 4:20 am

    what incredible list!

  2. 2
    Bleyder
    August 7th, 2009 4:23 am

    Very useful. Thanks!

  3. 3
    Ollie
    August 7th, 2009 4:28 am

    Vegur is my favourite font ever. :)

  4. 4
    Maiku
    August 7th, 2009 4:29 am

    Very nice, thanks!

  5. 5
    Paulo Henrique
    August 7th, 2009 4:29 am

    Very nice the fonts!

  6. 6
    Joel
    August 7th, 2009 4:38 am

    Thanks for putting the others on there, just re-installed windows and this saves me going back to find the other post aswell ^_^

    Cheers

    Dayjo

  7. 7
    Jasmin Halkić
    August 7th, 2009 4:40 am

    Nice fonts. Thanks.

  8. 8
    Leia Vieira
    August 7th, 2009 4:49 am

    tks so much =)

  9. 9
    Anton Agestam
    August 7th, 2009 5:13 am

    These type faces are awesome! Thanks a lot!

  10. 10
    Dirman Suharno
    August 7th, 2009 5:18 am

    mm some are repost, but overall these typefaces are awesome!

  11. 11
    Jeffrey Tang
    August 7th, 2009 5:19 am

    I love you Smashing Mag. Awesome fonts!

  12. 12
    DS
    August 7th, 2009 6:03 am

    Hi,

    First off, these are some really beautiful and awesome fonts. I’m new to web design and I’ve this question. I realized as soon as I actually got into coding, PSD -> XHTML that when it comes to font, both of these areas are poles apart. While I was able to use any fonts till now in my photoshop art documents, when it comes to making a website and coding it, we can not use any font that we want. The font has to be available on viewer’s machine! And there is no very good font-embedding methods available yet. (I was lead to read about SiFR but I realized it has some crucial drawbacks.)

    So my question is how do experienced web developers use these free fonts in their website design? I mean, we can not make our text into images due to scaling issues as well as because it is not search engine friendly, not to mention the slowness issue. Then how are these fonts helpful to web developers except for in use in headings?

    Help me understand the process please?

  13. 13
    Stacy
    August 7th, 2009 6:15 am

    @Dirman Suharno: Hah! I’m not crazy. :) I thought I remembered seeing some of these.

  14. 14
    me
    August 7th, 2009 6:15 am

    Vegur is pretty close to Myriad (but not as good).

  15. 15
    michael
    August 7th, 2009 6:39 am

    @DS

    with CSS @fontface you can embed,
    with images you can embed the font,
    with flash you can embed the font,
    there are some tools in js and php who convert your text to a image file.

  16. 16
    tsdln
    August 7th, 2009 6:51 am

    what a list..i got it..perfect 4 typography…thanks

  17. 17
    Maxime
    August 7th, 2009 7:00 am

    I love free fonts! Thx

  18. 18
    Mugros
    August 7th, 2009 7:20 am

    I don’t like these Free Fonts posts.
    Most of the time they are not “free”. Mostly they are free for personal use but here are a lot of professionals. So you have to read through all the terms to see if it is free for commercial uses. This should be done before posting “free” fonts.

  19. 19
    aR
    August 7th, 2009 7:53 am

    Great and exitng collection. Start to download them all. Thank you SM. I will write a post about this page on my Blog.

  20. 20
    Patrick B.
    August 7th, 2009 8:00 am

    Bravo! Très jolies fontes, belle initiative!

    ::

  21. 21
    Shawn
    August 7th, 2009 8:10 am

    Wow. This is one of the best collections of ACTUALLY USEFUL fonts I’ve seen in awhile! Thank you!

  22. 22
    aniec2
    August 7th, 2009 8:48 am

    Love it!

  23. 23
    Matthew Nuzum
    August 7th, 2009 8:57 am

    @Mugros I agree, “free” is used quite loosely, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value.

    I really like the font and the premise behind Tiresias and it is a GPL font w/ a clarification that you can use it in a document w/out requiring the document being GPL’d as well.

  24. 24
    toymachiner62
    August 7th, 2009 9:18 am

    @DS you can just create an image with the font you want and then set that image as the background to an tag for example. Then in your CSS you just give the tag the property of “text-indent:-9999px;” Now your special font will be visible and the text will not.

  25. 25
    Yuri van Essen
    August 7th, 2009 9:33 am

    @DS

    Well, just like you are saying, it’s mainly for headers, logo’s and so on. Using system fonts is a crucial part of webdesigning and you can still make beautifull sites with them. Try experimenting with line height, letter & word spacing…

  26. 26
    Jason
    August 7th, 2009 9:51 am

    Needed some more fonts. Thank you.

  27. 27
    jericho
    August 7th, 2009 10:26 am

    Stop copying articles from hongkiat and other blogs!!!!!!!!!!!!!! losers

  28. 28
    Fake
    August 7th, 2009 10:30 am

    Так а чо, кроме «ДНИ» кириллических шрифтов нету?

  29. 29
    Keith Storm
    August 7th, 2009 11:40 am

    @DS

    Check out TypeSelect:

    http://www.typeselect.org

  30. 30
    Andreas
    August 7th, 2009 12:17 pm

    omg – which one to check out first? ;-)

  31. 31
    Wondering
    August 7th, 2009 12:24 pm

    How the hell is Andale Mono New exactly?

  32. 32
    Ian
    August 7th, 2009 12:45 pm

    Andale Mono is under the reminder section, not the new section. :)

  33. 33
    Chris Robinson
    August 7th, 2009 2:47 pm

    Some nice ones

  34. 34
    Terrance
    August 7th, 2009 7:22 pm

    Thanks. Fonts are so important in design and how it plays a important part with the visitors, really do encourage us to spend some time analysis the optimized fonts for our site.

  35. 35
    David Boni
    August 7th, 2009 8:47 pm

    It should be mentioned that CP Mono does indeed have lowercase glyphs. There’s also various weights… making it extremely awesome! I recommend everyone go grab it right now. Coolest monospace font I’ve seen in a while.

  36. 36
    Retheesh
    August 8th, 2009 12:26 am

    Good collection of fonts….Thank you

  37. 37
    klausany
    August 8th, 2009 2:25 am

    Nice fonts!

  38. 38
    shsihkebab
    August 8th, 2009 5:44 am

    HOLY GAWD MOTHERRUSSIA! awesome frggin coolness fonts and its darn free!

  39. 39
    Riyan
    August 8th, 2009 10:33 am

    Killer fonts Thk’SS

  40. 40
    Robin
    August 8th, 2009 11:08 am

    Thanks for the list

  41. 41
    johnnyz525
    August 8th, 2009 11:35 am

    Awesome…this a great collection and some are even new! Thanks

  42. 42
    Josh
    August 8th, 2009 1:08 pm

    post 18 : If smashing was any good they would list licensing info, or at least mention it. Alas all they can do is make lists of thing.

  43. 43
    K Richard Douglas
    August 8th, 2009 1:28 pm

    The perfect blog brings value to its readers. You have achieved that. Thanks.

  44. 44
    Fred K
    August 8th, 2009 9:58 pm

    A few clear ripoffs in there … no surprise since these are free. And surprisingly few really good ones. But that happens when these lists go round and round so, again, no surprise.

    Also, someone mentioned @font-face previously … beware that browser support of this fine method is spotty, plus there are any number of licensing issues that come into play if you do use the @font-face method for webfonts (yes, even “free” ones). Zeldman had a great summary of the webfonts state recently (on zeldman.com), you’d do well to read up on it. There’s a WG at W3C looking at the webfonts issue as well. Meaning, it’s a thornier issue than it may seem at first glance. Meanwhile, for those with cash in hand, there are services like typekit and kernest (to name a few) that may be of interest.

    Anyway. ./.

  45. 45
    Venkatesh
    August 9th, 2009 3:38 am

    it’s very useful! Thank you for Smashing Magazine!!

  46. 46
    Peter Baker
    August 9th, 2009 5:33 am

    You’ve done a great job compiling these fonts. Most free fonts are so peculiar in their kerning/leading that you realize WHY they’re free. But these are very solid!

    Thanks so much for putting in this much work,
    Peter Baker

  47. 47
    Ravernaught
    August 9th, 2009 5:35 am

    Go Ripe, love it!!!

  48. 48
    Adam Fairhead
    August 9th, 2009 10:00 am

    Nice round up of new free fonts. I’d love to see them separated by license, too, if another one of these comes along. For the sake of making life easier when the tab bar becomes unwieldy with all the font pages open!

    Great work.

  49. 49
    Tuts King
    August 9th, 2009 2:42 pm

    It’s nice to see a new list of free fonts. Well done.

  50. 50
    Silverback
    August 9th, 2009 11:32 pm

    Thanx, some of them are really great. Love Pinvoke Pixel Fonts and Vegur.

  51. 51
    Andrew Butterworth
    August 10th, 2009 12:24 am

    @DS

    There are several techniques you can use. A common one is to simply create the text you would like in Photoshop and then simply cut it out. You then use CSS to use the image whilst also still having the text there as well but indent it 9999px off the screen. This way when images are disabled or styles then your page will still read with a text header there as well.

    There are other ways like SIFr flash replacement and the CSS embed property that will become more popular once CSS3.0 becomes mainstream.

    Hope that helps

    Good list of fonts – thanks SM

  52. 52
    Will
    August 10th, 2009 6:38 am

    Great list! I can always use new fonts.

  53. 53
    petar
    August 10th, 2009 9:40 am

    new fonts?

  54. 54
    Cigdem
    August 10th, 2009 10:17 am

    I just cant download M+ Outline fonts, they look pretty neat but when I go to the webpage, I get lost

  55. 55
    Carina
    August 10th, 2009 2:01 pm

    Thank you :) My favourites are Days, Andale and Mentone!

  56. 56
  57. 57
    Tom
    August 11th, 2009 4:32 am

    Good fonts!

  58. 58
    Francois
    August 11th, 2009 7:29 am

    Smashing Mag certainly SMASHES! Can’t wait to get your new book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  59. 59
    Viviana
    August 11th, 2009 7:46 am

    Very Usefull!
    Thanks a lot!

  60. 60
    Fragmented
    August 11th, 2009 3:31 pm

    As usual. Totally useful! Thanks!

  61. 61
    Sam Grant
    August 13th, 2009 3:41 am

    Great collection. It never ceases to amazes me how fontographers continue to deliver unique and functional typography. This set of fonts is definitely a welcome addition to any designer’s CPU. Thanx!

  62. 62
    carlos
    August 13th, 2009 6:55 am

    usefull as ever here!

  63. 63
    Riccardo
    August 14th, 2009 7:44 am

    Some beautiful fonts there. Thank you!

  64. 64
    389
    August 18th, 2009 5:51 am

    thx

  65. 65
    sayan mukherjee
    August 18th, 2009 8:29 am

    great collection…and thanx for shairing.

  66. 66
    Fran
    August 20th, 2009 4:51 pm

    Thank you!!! Beautiful fonts!

  67. 67
    54
    August 24th, 2009 10:01 pm

    thanks~~~~

  68. 68
    nunid
    September 3rd, 2009 7:54 am

    Thank Verry Much …

  69. 69
    gabriel
    September 17th, 2009 6:38 am

    are a beatifull fonts,

    thank you very much

  70. 70
    Danil
    September 26th, 2009 9:36 am

    It’s great Vegur!!!

  71. 71
    matt
    October 12th, 2009 5:47 pm

    wow, amazing work. Ripe is now my favorite. The rest is still awesome.

    Thank you!

  72. 72
    Annie Olsen
    October 16th, 2009 6:01 am

    I was just made aware of this page–thank you very much, Mr Friedman, for including Andika Basic in your list! We are honored to be in such good company. Just a note: only the regular weight font is available at this time. As other styles (italic, bold, and bold italic are planned) and characters are finished, they will be added to the free package.

  73. 73
    OHoRubpost fm Thailand
    November 19th, 2009 1:54 pm

    Great! Useful ^^

    Thanks you.

  1. 00

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