Webwalk I: selected links about fonts & typography

Download free fonts

You can get fabulous fonts for free. These sites store literally hundreds of quality fonts, free either for personal use of even commercial use. Some of these sites offer commercial fonts as well.

  • Larabie Fonts (Ray Larabie's): many fonts, many styles.
  • Moorstation: Designers Archive. A terrific archive that includes not only Nick Curtis' fonts, but also Manfred Klein (every style you can imagine, top quality), Paul Lloyd (historical revivals and blackletter), Derek Vogelpohl's Shy Fonts (many styles, especially futuristic and comix fonts), David Rakowsky, Graham Meade , The Apostrophic Lab (a collective of designers around the globe, offering a wide variety of styles; their catalog includes several Multiple Master Fonts), Jeff Levine (Jeff's dingbats) and many more, including some hard-to-find gems.
  • House of Lime: a wonderful and varied collection of fonts and dingbats.
  • The Dingbats Pages is a huge collections of useful dingbats (pictorial fonts). More about dingbats in our article on this subject.
  • Jeff Levine's Dingbats, with a big and diverse collection of dingbats. Including the vintage stock art from Cobb Shinn (cute!)
  • Dieter Steffann offers a huge collection of historical revivals, in Type 1 and Open Type formats.Very recommended.
  • Blambot fonts: neat comix fonts, and other interesting stuff for comics-oriented illustrators and designers.
  • Dinc Type, Diane DiPiazza's site, with many many interesting decorative fonts; her specialty: retro-esque, sixties-flavoured and pop/rock music-related typefaces.
  • Yet more interesting free fonts at Fontalicious, Iconian Fonts, Astigmatic and Pizzadude.

Purchase fonts

Purchase top-quality fonts from these vendors / distributors / foundries, whatever that applies:

  • ITC fonts, one of the most respected type distributors, home of the celebrated U&lc magazine (alas, this dissapeared in printed format a few years ago.)
  • Font Shop, with a good online shop and regional sites and magazines in different countries.
  • House Industries; not just interesting fonts, but also clipart and merchandise.
  • p22, a wonderful type foundry, specialized in artist's lettering (Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Hopper...) and arts-related fonts.
  • Another recommended foundry that recreates historical fonts and handwriting, The Scriptorium / Fontcraft.
  • Linotype, and Agfa-Monotype have gone beyond the age that gives their respective names and now sell, of course, digital type online.
  • Fountain is a friendly (so they say) font foundry, up in Sweden.
  • Storm Type Foundry, in Czechia, is Frantisek Storm site. Well designed, with beautiful pdf specimens and specialized in text fonts.
  • Nick's Fonts, Nick Curtis' site, is an absolute must-visit. He (re)creates many typefaces, based on historical sources and spanning several decades, with exquisite attention to details. His free fonts are no longer available for download, but you can easily find them in other font archives.

Learn abouts fonts & typography

Learn, discuss, be up-to-date... some sites to learn more about typography, news, gossip...

  • Prof. Luc Devroye's site (On Snot and Fonts) is the most comprehensive and well-organized type resource on the net. You find every conceivable link about fonts, complete with comments. If you must have only one bookmark about type, certainly, Luc's is the one you need.
  • Font Avenue is an excellent collection of links related to fonts, both font download sites, original fonts, font software, etc.
  • Gunnslaugur Briem's pages: from Iceland, Briem offers detailed lessons about calligraphy and font design.
  • Daniel Will-Harris is a talented writer and designer that shares his wisdom and knowledge of typography in his own site. His Esperfonto System teaches you to combine fonts to create attractive and effective designs. Daniel is also the alma mater of eFuse, a very good (and large) collection of articles about web site design.
  • Typographi.ca is a weblog that invariably points the reader to very good sites related with type and design.
  • Typophile is a good resource to learn and discuss typography (see the forums, with many topics.)
  • Microsoft has a good typography section in their site; the links and news section keeps you up to date.
  • Ancient Scripts of the world: learn about the history of writing systems, nearly unknown and extinct symbols, syllabaries... There is also a similar resource in spanish.
  • If you can read spanish, visit Unos Tipos Duros, an excellent resource about typography.

Manage your fonts

Make your font know who's boss! Somebody has to set all these files straight, and it might as well be you: all you need is a good font manager. You can also read our own article about font management. There are several software options; we comment a few of the most professional and powerful solutions, but there is a myriad of managers / viewers (check out Luc's links on this subject.)

  • Bitstream Font Navigator, included in Corel Draw 8+, this is a powerful and easy to use manager. His font sets (groups) feature is a godsend. Font Navigator is now discontinued, and Bitstream markets Diamondsoft Font Reserve instead, another font manager initially available only for Mac users, and now ported to Windows.
  • Adobe Type Manager Lite or DeLuxe. You will need ATM (the lite version is freeware) if you want to use Type 1 fonts in Windows, if you still use Windows 98 or earlier. The Deluxe version is a full-featured font manager, the lite version only lets you boss your Type 1 fonts.
  • Extensis Suitcase, like font Reserve was Mac-only, now works in Windows as well.
  • Typograf, a very good font management program available in Windows version only.
  • The Font Thing and Font Lister are good and free type managers, with some limitations: the first works only with TT fonts, the second is freeware only until version 2.

Create your own fonts

Create fonts. There are several programs you can use to create a font. A basic font your own use is easy to crank up (see our workshop articles); to create professional-caliber typefaces is another issue!

  • Fontlab is the most modern and powerful font creation program. Fontlab is able to create multiple master fonts and Opentype. Other font tools from the same developer: Scanfont, Type Tool and TransType.
  • Fontographer was the program that started the font creation avalanche in the early nineties. Its development stalled for quite a few years, while Macromedia owned it. Recently Fontlab has acquired this groundbreaking program and there seems to be plans for further development.
  • Corel Draw: yes, you can export drawings as True Type or Type 1 fonts using Corel Draw? Yes, you can do it, ever since version 3, from ten years ago! Obviously, the control on offer isn't nearly as complete as in Fontographer of Fontlab, but if you use Draw, you already have something to create fonts!
  • The Font Creator Program, created by High Logic, is a basic Truetype editor, that is being improved from version to version. See our review.
  • If you are a Linux / MacOSX user, there is a program (based on Fontographer) called pfa Edit Fontforge, issued as gnu-freeware. It is possible to run it under Windows, but it requires some extra installation work.
  • Fontifier is a commercial online service that turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font.
  • This is something funny and experimental: The Art21 Alphabet Synthesis Machine is an online artwork which allows visitors to create and breed personalized "nonsense alphabets"-coherent sets of abstract forms which might resemble the plausible writing systems of imaginary civilizations or unfamiliar societies.