Smashing Magazine

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 PT Sans, FF Celeste Sans Offc Black, Secca STD, Cantarell and many other regular and experimental high-quality free fonts. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the license can change from time to time.

You may also want to take a look at our previous typography-related posts:

• 20 New High Quality Free Fonts
  In this previous “free fonts” edition we present Madawaska ExtraLight, Apparatus SIL, League Gothic, Contra and many other high-quality free fonts.
• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
  The price of good 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.
• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
  A review of useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you already get your copy of the Smashing Book?]

New High Quality Free Fonts

PT Sans (PDF specimen)
The Russian type design company “Paratype” released an extensive free sans-serif family with 8 font weights: Regular, Italic, Bold, Bold Italic, Caption Regular, Caption Bold, Narrow Regular and Narrow Bold (700+ glyphs each). The family can be used for legal documents on screen and in print. The family contains glyphs to various Cyrillic languages as well Latin glyphs, signs, fractions, numerators etc. A very impressive free font. License: free for personal and commercial projects.

FF Celeste Sans Offc Black Set (Registration is required)
FF Celeste Sans Offc Black Set comes in an easy-to-use format optimized for everyday use in Microsoft Office apps. You can use the style-linked (regular and italic in one menu item) FF Celeste Sans Offc for free. License: free for personal and commercial projects.

Secca STD (2 Demo fonts) (Registration is required)
Secca is a fine and simple typeface honoring the roots of early German grotesque type designs but mastered for the needs of today. The weights work perfectly for body text. Two weights are available for free downloads: Secca Std Demo Regular and Secca Std Demo Bold. Designed by Andreas Seidel. A registration is required.

Fh_Lentil Regular (the designer has removed the font)
For more fonts, and other resources, visit Fictionalhead.com’s Fonts New font created for personal use. Additional families being developed (bold, italic, etc.) to be released at a future date. License: free only for personal projects.

Mr Jones Book
Mr Jones was originally conceived as a family for print design consisting of a sans and a headline. The lowercase are wide for legibility at small sizes while the caps are narrower to save space and keep an even balance of negative space when used in body copy. The overall widths of certain characters have been adjusted to almost extremes to keep an even balance of white space around each letter. He works well in body copy, but will need decreased tracking for larger settings. Two weights are available for free download: Mr Jones Book and Mr Jones Book Italic. Designed by Richard Miller.

Clutchee
Clutchee Font is perfect for t-shirts, also applicable for any type of graphic design, web, print, motion graphics etc. License: free for personal and commercial work.

Digitica
A very interesting, original geometric font, designed by Samuel Delabarre and available for free download. License: free for personal and commercial work.

Cantarell
The typeface is designed as a contemporary Humanist sans serif, and was developed for on-screen reading; in particular, reading web pages on an HTC Dream mobile phone. Each font file currently contains 391 glyphs, and fully support the following writing systems: Basic Latin, Western European, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Dutch and Afrikaans. To date, Pan African Latin has only 33% glyph coverage. Since the design is aimed at display on-screen at small sizes, the printed output (especially of the bold and oblique) may not work well. License: free for personal and commercial work.

tribbon ‘Layered’ font
This layered ‘ribbon’ style font was created by Dominic Le-Hair. It is a working ‘ribbon’ style font that consists of several layers and is available in both TTF and OTF font formats for free download. License: free only for personal work.

Exus Pilot
An original geometric free font in True Type format. A good choice for poster design. Designed by Mauro Hernández. License: free for private and commercial projects.

Orbitron
A geometric sans-serif typeface intended for display purposes. It features four weights (light, medium, bold, and black), a stylistic alternative, small caps, and a ton of alternate glyphs. Orbitron was designed so that graphic designers in the future will have some alternative to typefaces like Eurostile or Bank Gothic. License: free for private and commercial projects.

Ripe Font Family
A geometric post-modern slab serif face. The serifs feature simplistic rounded terminals and its stroke is uniform. 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. The family has 4 weights (Regular, Light, Semibold, Bold) containing 577 characters in each weight. License: free for private and commercial projects.

Goudy Trajan Regular
Goudy Trajan is based on the drawings by American type designer Frederic W. Goudy of his rendition of the capital letters inscribed on the Trajan column. One of the most elegant typefaces in the CastleType library, Goudy Trajan works especially well at large sizes. The Regular weight (shown above) contains many alternate letters and discretionary ligatures for more versatile typography. It also includes the Cyrillic alphabet and over 100 classic fleurons. Click here to view all glyphs. Download specimen. “Goudy Trajan is possibly the finest font I have discovered” (D.S. from Omaha, Nebraska.) The Goudy Trajan family includes: Regular, Medium, and Bold. A single font is available for free download. License: free for private and commercial projects.

St Transmission (free for personal use only)
This free font is available in two weights: thin and extrabold. It has standard OpenType features such as ligatures, slashed zero, contextual alternates and lining figures. The Extrabold weight is ideal for bold headlines. Designed by Sascha Timplan. License: free only for private projects.

Keeparty (Large preview)
A very original, colorful typeface created by Eugene Rudyy. License: free for personal and commercial projects.

LOT (large preview)
LOT is a free font applicable for any type of graphic design – web, print, motion graphics etc. It is a good fit for T-shirts and other items like logos or pictograms. Format: Opentype (.otf) Compatible: PC and Mac. The font contains 78 glyphs. License: free for personal and commercial projects.

Recycle it font
License: free for personal and commercial projects.

Denne’s aliens
A hand-written, original, playful font with basic glyphs set. Designed by Denise Bentulan. License: free for personal projects, designer’s permission is required to use the font for commercial purposes.

Pac Font
An older, yet quite original and attractive free font. License: free for personal use only.

Merge
A very simple, yet playful and nice looking free font, designed by Philatype type foundry and released for free download in the OpenType format. License: free for personal and commercial projects.

Further useful collections

• 24 high quality free and stunning symbol fonts
  Fonts are the vital need of any designer. But now a days font demands are increasing in regular computer users as well. Depending on the needs and modern trend we are going to list down some really beautiful and unique examples of 24 High Quality Free And Stunning Symbol Fonts. We hope these fonts will be useful for you.
• Top 10 Programming Fonts
  A round-up of 10 readily-available monospace fonts. Many of these fonts are bundled along with modern operating systems, but most are free for download on the web. A few, notably Consolas, are part of commercial software.

  

• 40 free unique cartoon and comic fonts
  Have you ever feel that traditional fonts are a little too boring and plain for your designs and artworks? Ever wanted to use fonts that are funkier, stylish and fun to look at? Cartoon and comic fonts are very popular and most people are only familiar with Comic Sans MS and that’s about it. We have now discovered 40 unique and refreshing cartoon and comic fonts for you to give your artwork and design that extra ummmppphhh. Here are a few for sneak preview and the full list is right after the jump.
• 5 Excellent Calligraphic Fonts
  A small collection of nice calligrapic fonts found over at Dafont.com.

  

Related Posts

You may also want to take a look at our previous typography-related posts:

• 20 New High Quality Free Fonts
  In this previous “free fonts” edition we present Madawaska ExtraLight, Apparatus SIL, League Gothic, Contra and many other high-quality free fonts.
• 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
  The price of good 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.
• 50 Useful Design Tools For Beautiful Web Typography
  A review of useful typographic tools, techniques and resources for creating effective and expressive designs. We will also look at some hands-on typography tools that help designers and developers learn how to style their Web content, test it interactively and see the changes instantly.