Some Great Places to Find Free—and Legal!—Fonts
Type lovers on a budget can find high-quality fonts at no cost.
Maybe you’re new to InDesign (or to design in general) and you’re looking for ways to extend your design power without spending more money. Maybe you’re an experienced designer looking for more typographic oomph.
We thought it would be a good service to give you a decently comprehensive list of where you can get some good fonts—and not just for free, but legitimately so. These fonts that are offered by their designers and developers without strings—some simply for love of craft, others for promotion, still others dangled as carrots to get you to license comprehensive type families.
We’ve tried in good faith to tell you the reliability of these sites, but if you download fonts from any website, it’s up to you to check the end-use license agreement that accompanies the download, so you don’t run afoul of the law. (Don’t be like NBC.)
Adobe Fonts
Newbies might not fully realize that part of the value of Adobe’s subscription plans includes access to a growing font library. Formerly known as Typekit, Adobe Fonts lets you activate fonts that you can use in any of your applications.
And if you want to be pedantic, the Adobe Fonts are not free per se—they are a benefit of your paid subscription—but you can turn them on and off at will and have them available immediately. That sure makes them feel free!
Visit fonts.adobe.com and use your Adobe login credentials to get going.
Some caveats:
/wp:paragraph –>- If you let your subscription plan lapse, you will lose all access to all these fonts.
- Nothing in the software world is permanent! Companies providing the fonts to Adobe can come and go. In 2020, Font Bureau ended its relationship with Adobe Fonts, removing access to 50 or so type families and hundreds of fonts, but the company did offer some pretty hefty discounts on its products and services for those affected.
- There is no way to include these fonts for a printer in InDesign’s Package command. That sounds alarming, but think of it this way: They will be embedded in PDFs, and if a vendor needs to open your InDesign file, they will also have access to Adobe Fonts. If you are archiving a project to ensure that someone will be able to open your file years later with all the necessary resources in one folder, you might consider not using Adobe Fonts in your document.
Most Adobe commercial subscription plans, including the full subscription and single application plans, offer access to a library of more than 20,000 fonts. Trial subscriptions and some enterprise and academic accounts have access to what Adobe terms its “basic library” — a core collection of 1,700 fonts.
Font Squirrel
It is easy to find ample high-quality resources for even the most frugal labors of love on Font Squirrel, which offers a selection of more than 1,400 high-quality free fonts that is more discerning than you will find in other free repositories online.
The site, with a great search function and a tool to convert these fonts for web development, comes courtesy of Fontspring, which represents a number of smaller foundries.
Google Fonts
What happens when Google wants to get into fonts? Like so much that happens with this behemoth of a company, Google Fonts offerings—almost 1,300 type families—are vast, uneven, super searchable, and free to the end user, with a very white and minimal interface. You will find some uneven and lackluster type there amid really nice work.
New designers will appreciate the Pairings tab on the Google Fonts site, where you can see and try out other fonts in the collection that pair nicely with the one you’re exploring. Adobe Fonts offers a similar function.
Font Space and DaFont
Usually I think of sites like Font Space—a free font site with 84,000 files—as a disaster. But what sets Font Space apart from its peers like DaFont is its attention to licensing issues and its search interface.
The well-known free font site DaFont describes itself as “either freeware, shareware, demo versions or public domain.” But its biggest strength—almost 62,000 fonts in its archives—is its biggest vulnerability.
Many of the fonts on both these sites are old—some really old—and links to the contact information and websites for designers often dead (or redirecting to porn). Quality varies wildly; for every really nicely drawn, evenly spaced font, there will seemingly be 50 amateurish handwriting fonts distracting you from quality. And when you get demo fonts, you’ll likely find they’re missing some of the glyphs, like the hyphen or the apostrophe, which is just what you need if you’re on deadline.
There are times when you simply need an oddball font. Font Space makes that search quicker and lets you very easily search only for fonts for which commercial licensing is available. But when you need a font of glyphs of, say, Dominoes, you can find it there—except it’s licensed for personal use only, and contact links for its pseudonymous author are broken.
Take it from this graphic designer: For almost any reason you’d be looking for options on either of these sites, you can get far better results elsewhere and do so far more easily.
The League of Moveable Type
A small but deliberately selected collection of free, open-source type, The League of Movable Type—which bills itself as the world’s first open-source type foundry—is bursting with attitude and the desire that you download and use these typefaces to level up your design skills.
The site offers lots of resources for budding typophiles, including a newsletter, a weekly podcast, and, of course, the fonts, which range from Linden Hill, a gorgeous revival of a Frederic Goudy serif family, to Blackout, which, the website reports, “makes your work louder than the next person’s.”
Come for the fonts, stay for the white-hot typographic passion.
Indestructible Type*
Like The League of Moveable Type, Indestructible Type* is a small-but-mighty collection. (Don’t look for a footnote here—the asterisk is branding of a sort.)
“Central to the vision of the foundry, is making free, highly versatile, archetypal typography. Fonts that capture the essence of a typographic idea and will look good in any context,” writes type designer Owen Earl of his foundry, Indestructible Type* . “Fonts that will have a full range of widths and styles and use the latest technology to recreate the best designs of history.”
Earl offers beautiful versions of Bodoni (Bodoni*) and Clarendon (Besley*), as well as Jost*, which “aims to keep the attitude of Futura rather than the exact design,” he writes.
Free promotions and demos
Often, type foundries offer promotions through vendors like MyFonts, and many will whet your appetite with one free style amid a larger family that is not free. If you get used to the one free roman version and you want the italic, you’ll likely be more inclined to purchase the family.
Some of these fonts are not free per se—demo versions of commercial fonts are intended for designers to use in kicking the tires. In addition to not being legal for actual use in a commercial project, these fonts generally have omitted certain glyphs or replaced them with a “demo” glyph that will at the very least be an irritation to a designer.
Here are links to searches for free fonts from a few large and well-known vendors.
Sketchy sites and piracy
One last note: If you search online for free fonts, you will stumble on any number of sites that offer abundant downloads of fonts amid a clutter of ads and vaguely worded information. Consider these sites the Wild West, where you might well encounter malware and flagrantly pirated software, which can put you and others at legal risk. You can do better, and the fonts will still be free!
A slightly different situation is software development repositories like GitHub, which have become shockingly significant vectors of font piracy, largely through ignorance of developers mirroring projects on the platform.
You can find abundant open-source fonts on GitHub, but especially if you’re new to fonts and licensing, don’t risk it. Instead, seek out those same fonts on Font Squirrel, Google Fonts, or Adobe Fonts—all of which offer sites with respective user interfaces that are created for end users, not as terrifying professional tools for the developers of the sites you want to be using.
Do you have a go-to site for free fonts? Leave us a comment and let us know.
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