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Friday, November 28, 2008

5 Excellent Sources To Download Free Text Fonts

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5 Excellent Sources To Download Free Text Fonts

via MakeUseOf.com by Mark O'Neill on 11/28/08

When I was a little innocent computer newbie, still finding my way around a keyboard and gasping with delight at the internet ("WOW! HOTMAIL!"), I made a few really bad mistakes while learning. One of them (which I still cringe about to this day) was back in 2000 when I installed 9000 fonts on Microsoft Word and then wondered why it took forever for the damn thing to start up! ("Dear Mr Gates, I'd like to complain about your Word product and its slow startup speed….")

Even though I have learnt my lesson from that day, I still love fonts and I am always trying out new ones. Art and graphic design were my best subjects at school and calligraphy has always been a big interest of mine as well. So I am always collecting new free online sources for fonts.

Here are the five best ones in my opinion :

What The Font?!

Do you really like a particular poster design or a particular style of font and you would like to duplicate it? "What The Font" allows you to upload a scanned image of a piece of writing or a font and it will identify the name of the font for you. Or instead of uploading, you can point it to a URL.

It seems to be very accurate and fast. I uploaded a scan of the title of a book I have called "To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. "What The Font" identified the font seconds later as "Baskerville Old Face" :

DDFont

Some nice fonts here. Not too many to choose from but the ones that ARE available are quite nice. Just click on the one you want, enter the activation code, and it will download to your computer.

Fonts 500

Claims to be the top 500 free fonts on the web. Not sure if that is true but nevertheless the fonts on this site are REALLY good. Each one is in a ZIP file so just click on the ones you want and they will immediately download to your computer. Then just unzip them. Some notable ones include Harry Potter, Yahoo, Scrabble letters, Star Wars, Godfather, Terminator, Bon Jovi and Pizza Hut.

TypeNow

Here, they have some movie and TV themed fonts. If you have a favourite movie or TV programme, check here to see if the font is available. TV show-wise, they have things like "Lost" and "Prison Break", movie-wise, they have ones like Casino Royale and Kill Bill. In other ones, they have the Google font and Estee Lauder, among others. Worth checking out.

Search Free Fonts

This excellent site allows you to search through 13,000 free fonts, broken down into various categories. When you click on a particular font, it then gives you a close up view of that font so you can see what it looks like. You can type in your own text, specify a size up to 72 and preview it in that font so you can decide which font will suit you best before downloading it :

To finish off, here's a College Humor video on a "Font Conference" which I have always found very funny.

Where do you find your fonts? What are your favourite sites?

(By) Mark O'Neill is a freelance blogger and professional writer. He is also the managing and publishing editor of MakeUseOf. Check out his personal blog at Better Than Therapy

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