I’ve been in the graphic design field for almost six years and didn't know a single thing about fonts before I started. I’m guilty of the cardinal sins: I used to stretch type, use horrible effects and browse Dafont too often.
One day I saw the silver lining, Lost Type Co-Op, a small co-op of type designers releasing small batch typefaces free for personal use (and a small fee for a commercial license.) From there, I began to search more and discovered a multitude of sites — some hits and some misses.
To help guide you to some better alternatives than using system fonts or Dafont, I have created this list of my six favorite font websites.
I’m going to break this down into two lists: Free and Paid. Don't worry, I understand the struggles of being a designer, but if you don't buy new tools once in awhile you won't be able to keep up.
Let’s start with what you want to see, the free stuff.
Free Commercial Font Sites
Google Fonts
A complete workhorse site, all of these fonts are open source. You can download them and use them for commercial purposes as well as the web. (The text you are reading is set in the highly legible and versatile Open Sans).
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is a well-designed library of carefully curated commercial fonts you can splurge on downloading guilt-free. The design of this site is wonderful and they make it easy to find the font you are looking for.
Behance
You may know of Behance as a place for designers to share their work. Sometimes that work just happens to be free commercial-use fonts (warning: be sure to read the fine print when downloading fonts.) Check out this collection of free fonts from other hardworking designers.
Paid Commercial Font Sites
There are plenty of type foundries out there and as much as I’d love to list them all off, I have to keep this list down. So here are some of the best bang-for-your-buck sites.
Lost Type Co-Op
This is a staple for a design student. When I encountered a new project and just wasn’t sure which font to pick, I spent many clicks here downloading their library of free personal-use fonts. However, as I grew as a designer, I was finally able to put a little down for some typefaces I loved. This site features type designed by some of the hottest designers in the game right now (Aaron James Draplin’s DDC Hardware being my latest favorite).
Creative Market
Creative Market offers a variety of assets for designers, from vectors to single typefaces to massive bundles of fonts for any project you may have coming up. You can spend your hard-earned money on font packs that are curated toward what you are looking for. They also feature some freebies, so sign up for that newsletter list.
Design Cuts
While they don't always offer font bundles, Design Cuts does offer plenty of vector asset bundles that would be very useful to anyone's vector collection. The real gem here is the highly discounted massive bundle of fonts released every so often featuring some of the hottest type foundries out right now; for example, LatinoType, Miller Type Foundry, Laura Worthington and many more.
There are many more sites to purchase your favorite set of beautifully designed letters. Get out there and learn about some new fonts and designers in the process! Be sure to support your favorite foundry, too!
Looking for some free script fonts? Download our free script font package!
