So Many Fonts, So Little Print
I went on a free-font-downloading bender last weekend. I still love typography, and I’m glad to see the arcane art of type design isn’t dying out. Back in the old days of Desktop Publishing, you had a choice between high-quality but expensive fonts from reputable foundries, or a bunch of cheap but crappy knockoffs done in Fontographer.
But now, thanks to mass amateurization, there are people who actually know what they’re doing, who design new typefaces for the fun of it and give them away. (The cannier ones give a few away as teasers and charge for the rest.) Collecting these makes for a fun evening once in a while, at least it does if you share my predilections. There’s the surprise of discovery, the glee of downloading it for free, and then later the avaricious satisfaction of organizing the fonts on your computer, like Scrooge McDuck running coins through his fingers.
The problem is that these days I don’t actually have a whole lot of use for fonts. Desktop Publishing is passé, I hardly ever print anything, and when I design something for the web I can’t use obscure fonts that other people don’t have. It’s frustrating! It makes me want to start a zine.
“Free fonts, huh?”
Now everyone’s waiting for me to cough up the links to these beautiful fonts. Well, I did say it was a “bender”, and one of the aspects of a bender is that you’re not paying a lot of attention to how you got where you are … as when a friend of mine in college famously regained consciousness late one evening hanging from the dining room chandelier. So you can understand that I wasn’t carefully bookmarking everything. Still, from the leftover detritus I can piece together links to a few of the sites I crawled through:
- The candidly-named FontLeech
- Smeltery.net [Warning! Clicking this link will resize your browser window too large, and then perversely open a new one; but the delights within will make everything all better]
- Smashing Magazine breathlessly reveals Five Freefonts You Shouldn’t Have Missed
- Vitaly Friedman’s listings of free quality fonts, which send you off in a dozen directions at once
- COM4t has several lovely fonts scattered over a site that makes it hard to tell where the avant-gardery ends and mere Engrish begins
Show & Tell
I should show you at least one of these … my pick is COM4t’s gorgeous Spirequal Light, which would have been quite at home in the legendary American Type Founders 1923 catalog:
January 23rd, 2007 at 9:56 AM
Tom7 has some fun fonts you might like as well for more of the hand-drawn look. I particularly like that he has the handwriting of Douglas Adams.
In fact, you should probably check out some of the other stuff Tom7 does. His quirky humor might suit you.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:23 PM
Blambot is good if you want a wide variety of comic lettering. Not really ‘typography’ in the traditional sense, though.
January 23rd, 2007 at 6:24 PM
Okay apparently your OpenID thing works now, but it uses the URL instead of the FOAF-proscribed nickname.
January 25th, 2007 at 1:06 AM
Have you seen Gentium and Linux Libertine?
I’m designing flyers and stuff from time to time and i can sometimes use a sepcial font there. My favourite site is dafont.com.
January 25th, 2007 at 7:49 AM
“The problem is that these days I don’t actually have a whole lot of use for fonts. Desktop Publishing is passé, I hardly ever print anything, and when I design something for the web I can’t use obscure fonts that other people don’t have.”
Reminds me of my tour of Moscow — my guide told me, “Under Communism, we had all the money we wanted, but the stores were empty. Now, the stores are full, but we have no money.”
January 25th, 2007 at 7:58 AM
You know, while I would agree with your statement that you can’t use obscure fonts on the web back in 2000, or so, I can’t any longer. I suggest that you look into CSS, and font linking. The font is then downloaded and cached by the browser just like an image, and the user sees the content through the font you want. That simple, and if the font isn’t larger than 40 kb, it’s something trivial and worth looking for.
January 25th, 2007 at 12:35 PM
saoshyant — please be more specific about “font linking”! I searched and found some old competing IE-specific and Netscape-specific technologies. There’s also an “@font-face” directive in CSS2, but from what I’ve seen, it’s not actually supported in browsers yet:
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/browser_support/basic_concepts.html
March 2nd, 2007 at 10:25 PM
re: obscure fonts for the web
You can always try out sIFR. Embed a font in a Flash file, and a Javascript will render that font in the browser, on the fly. There’s always (X)HTML/CSS behind the replaced text, so this method degrades silently if someone doesn’t have access to Flash. Works beautifully with CMSes. Pages with sIFR validate just fine.