Fonts are to written words like accents are to spoken language. They convey information separate from what is actually being said. In essence, fonts can convey a tone and are necessary in designing a website. We’ve compiled a list of places to get quality, free fonts and resources to help you use them wisely.
Google Fonts
Oh, Google! What haven’t you touched?! We’re grateful for their awesome font site where you can easily find and download families of free fonts. A font family includes different weights like thin, light, regular, medium, bold, extrabold, etc. They also suggest font pairings–which font looks good with other fonts. A great, affordable way to get quality fonts up and running on your website.
Adobe Fonts
If you have an Adobe Creative Cloud license, you automatically have access to Adobe Fonts. It is a great tool for finding the right fonts and easily to integrate your fonts into your website. It has all the functionality that Google Fonts has like finding and filtering your results to find the right font, whether it’s a sans-serif, serif, etc.
Typewolf
Typewolf is an amazing type resource that keeps you up to date with what’s going on in the font world. The quality of the font suggestions and resources is superb. If you have a beautiful font that you want for free, Typewolf has compiled a very useful list (for $35) giving the most similar “free” version of that font and where to download it. They also have a site of the day page which showcases beautiful web examples of fonts in action along with other useful guides for free.
Font Squirrel
This is a site solely dedicated to free fonts. We will insert now that not all free fonts are designed equally. There are a lot of great fonts on Font Squirrel, but there are many fonts that should be featured on an inferior rodent font site like Font Rat. You get what you pay for, so beware. That being said, it’s a great resource for finding a good, free font that you can use on your site.
Fonts by Hoefler&Co.
The Hoefler Type Foundry is responsible for some of the most ubiquitous fonts that we see on a daily basis. Some of his fonts show up in the SNL, Obama, and GQ logos (FYI, all those logos use the same font:)) If you really want to know, that font is called Gotham, and the closest free alternative is called Montserrat–and it’s everywhere on the web. You won’t find any poor quality fonts designed by Hoefler. They are top-notch and very usable. They do cost money though unfortunately, but definitely worth it.