Commercial free fonts

A great source of design inspiration restricted by reality.

Commercial free fonts abound on the internet, but for the professional designer they are more a source of inspiration rather than of practical use (this does occasionally occur) due to a few mitigating factors. Namely, especially for magazine design, the limited amount of typeface forms in a family, ie hard to design a ‘feel’ to product with only Roman and Bold faces (come on at least give us the italics too!).

Their major benefit is for titling purposes, use a funky typeface along with your standard trusted body text and you can get some great results (just check they all export to postscript and PDF correctly first though!). Also they are usually free, negating the huge expensive of modern faces (c.€300 for a family of styles).

So the benefits are of creating a more original work, saving some finances and just enjoying the design experience by researching them in the first place.

Some good sites:

http://www.dafont.com/

http://www.urbanfonts.com

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/