As we examined last week in our Font Replacement Review, new technologies have liberating web typography from the ordinary web safe fonts to a truly wide open horizon of new and bold and imaginative typefaces. It's easier than ever to include your own custom fonts in a web design using various font replacement technologies. Today, we'll review over 30 fonts that are worthy of your own font library.
Resource Roundup: Fonts for the Web
This is another in our series of "Resource Roundups". We hope to provide a place for designers to find great quality resources (icons, fonts, textures, etc.) that stand out from the pack of ordinary junk-stock. All of these fonts are free to use in your own web designs, and we've hand selected some of our favorites.
Licensing Notes
A note on licensing: Each of these fonts that we've selected is free unless stated otherwise, but you'll have to look at each individual packs' licensing information to determine whether or not you can use them in commercial projects.
The League of Moveable Type uses the Open Type License, which actually has a goal of creating a completely open font environment on the web.
Most of the fonts from MyFonts.com include 1 or 2 'free versions' which are awesome in their own right, but you'll have to fork over some cash to get the entire library (some include as many as 30 different weights). Visit the buying page to grab the free versions.
Code
Code, is a high quality, fresh and clean font designed by Manual Kerning that looks awesome in it’s bold style. It is applicable for any type of graphic design – web, print, motion graphics etc and perfect for t-shirts and other items like posters, logos.
Raleway
Here's one from the incredible "League of Moveable Type" library, which you should bookmark instantly if you haven't already. Raleway is an elegant sans-serif typeface, designed in a single thin weight. It is a display face that features both old style and lining numerals, standard and discretionary ligatures, a pretty complete set of diacritics, as well as a stylistic alternate inspired by more geometric sans-serif typefaces than it’s neo-grotesque inspired default character set.
Goudy Bookletter 1911
Another from The League of Moveable Type. This throwback font brings instant authenticity and a sense of tradition to any design. These are letters that take command of the space around them; notice, for instance, the bowed shapes of the v and w.
Nevis
Nevis is a strong, angular typeface and is ideal for headings, text, buttons and everything in between.. It's assertive and bold, but manages to retain a friendly tone, and looks especially good when used in all caps.
Jura
Jura is a elegant serif typeface of narrow proportions with distinguishing details. The rounded, wedge shaped serifs offer a more contemporary feels than many serif fonts, while maintaining legibility even at small sizes.
Anivers
Anivers is robust and rigid, forgiving, flexible and elegant ... and also suitable for a broad use: from a stationery to a poster headline. From an intro in a magazine to a base for a logo.
FR Hopper
FR Hopper is a sans based on geometric forms still having a friendly personality. It is inteneded for mid-length texts, captions, titles and almost any other occasional use - posters, flyers and even for web sites. The 430 and 431 weights are free and include a commercial license!
ST Ryde
St Ryde is a humanistic sans-serif with a slight touch of a script typeface. The most significant aspect of the typeface is the combined sharp and round treatment of the stroke endings. The complete Ryde Family contains five weights including real matching italics, so you can choose from thin, light, regular, medium and bold. The standard version comes free and includes a commercial license.
Indento
Indento is a multi-purpose modern geometric slab serif for headlines, posters, branding but fairly legible to be used as longer text. The straight and rounded corners combined with deep cuts and asymmetric serifs gives it a distinctive look while still keeping it’s rigorousness and legibility. The standard version comes free and includes a commercial license.
Kaine
Kaine is a bold slab-serif typeface influenced by Spagetti Western posters of the 1960s. The standard block version comes free and includes a commercial license.
Graublau Sans Web
A German typeface with lots of rich history in the print field makes its way to the web. Allows @font-face embedding
Prociono
Prociono is a beautiful serif and caligraphic font with some blackletter elements. It’s elegancy may fit any poster, that puts an accent on the typography, and beauty elements. It was designed by Barry Schwartz and is currently available in 1 style, with the both .ttf and .oth extensions.
Secca STD
Secca is a fine typeface honoring the roots of early German grotesque type designs but mastered for the needs of today. The weights from Light to Bold work perfectly for body text. The free version includes a private license only, so you can't use it for commercial projects.
Fertigo Pro
Fertigo-Pro is a beautiful, caligraphic and decorative great for headlines. It's available in two styles, one of it being available for free.
Museo
Museo is a very popular font nowdays. It is on a high demand because it is a very beautiful, clean and modern font.
Museo Sans
Museo Sans was created on a based well-known Museo font. It's OpenType font family offers also support for CE languages. Besides ligatures, automatic fractions, proportional/tabular lining and old-style figures, numerators, denominators, superiors and inferiors MUSEO also has a ‘case’ feature for case sensitive forms.
Sansation
Sansation is a beautiful, elegant and clean font. It is available in three different styles(Light, Regular, Bold), and has been updated to the 1.2 version recently.
Glide
Glide is an elegant custom font with rounded corners, great for logos, posters, motion graphics and t-shirts.
Mr. Jones
Mr Jones was originally conceived as a family for print design consisting of a sans and a headline. The lowercase are wide for legibility at small sizes while the caps are narrower to save space and keep an even balance of negative space when used in body copy.
LOT
Creative, Fat and Bold font designed by Manual Kerning. It’s “boldness” can be a favor for short-letter-`ed` logotypes and brands. It’s beauty can play a great role in any type of graphic design – web, print, motion graphics, various kinds of t-shirt designs and pictograms.
Daydream Daily
DayDream Daily Typeface is a beautiful, modern, elegant and bold font, available free of charge.
Diavlo
Diavolo is a beautiful, elegant and bold font, that is available in 5 different styles (Light, Book, Medium, Bold and Black).
Lifestyle Marker
LifeStyle Market is an elegant, semi-slab serif font available in 1 style and free of charge.
Avant Garde
AvanGarde LTD is an elegant, modern font that can be used as poster writings or/and headlines.
Sorts Mills Goudy
Another from The League of Moveable Type. Like the 1911 version, the Sorts Mills is another traditional serif typeface. Featuring some pretty sweet accentuating curves, this version brings class by the caseload. A ‘revival’ of Goudy Oldstyle and Italic, with features among which are small capitals (in the roman only), oldstyle and lining figures, superscripts and subscripts, fractions, ligatures, class-based kerning, case-sensitive forms, capital spacing. There is support for many languages that use latin script.
Junction
Another from The League of Moveable Type. Inspired by humanist sans serif typefaces such as Meta, Myriad, and Scala, Junction is where the best qualities of serif and sans serif typefaces come together. It has the hand drawn and human qualities of a serif, and still retains the clarity and efficiencies of a sans serif typeface. It combines the best of both worlds.
Calluna
Calluna is an elegant and serif font, inspired from the famous and beautiful work "Museo".
Fabryka
Fabryka is a modern monospaced lowercase family font available in 7 different styles.
Dream Orphanage
Dream Orphanage is a high quality reconstruction of the 1990s freeware classic, Dream Orphans font.
Fenwick
Fenwick is a lineal, metal type with unusual proportions. The almost sinuous curves of the numerals revive their inherent Arabian roots and the italic’s line thickness was amended by eye so as not appear too mechanical.
Cape Arcona BDN Bold
Based on the original CA BND typeface, this is the web font version, free for use in browsers.
BULL Pen
Bullpen is a beautiful, heavy, "masculin" and slab-serif font available in 15 different styles.
St. Marie
St. Marie is also a slab-serif and elegant font that fits great magazine and website headings and also typography posters.
Conclusion
We'll be coming out with more of these resource roundup posts in the future, so if we missed your own favorite free font for web designs, post a link to it down below in the comments!
Oh - and it's worth noting that it's never our goal here on Webdesigntuts+ to post "garbage stock", so if you spot a broken link or feel like something just isn't up to par with our standards, leave a comment. You can leave some nice comments as well though! Share your own favorite icons sets, or discuss any tricks that you have for managing your own collection of icons down below.
