Tagged: fonts

5 great font resources

Font sites

A brief collection of quality font sites

When it comes to free fonts on the web, you have so many options that it’s almost not worth Googling – you’ll spend an entire evening wading through add-filled sites that offer little in the way of quality fonts.

Here’s a brief list of some of my favorites that are light on ads, and heavy on quality fonts.

dafont – the king of the hill when it comes to free fonts!
UrbanFonts – nicely organized fonts
Fawnt – small collection, but you’ll find what you’re looking for easily
Fonts2U – large collection of dingbats included in a well organized collection
Fontex – high quality collection of design fonts

Font management with Suitcase Fusion 3 now extends to website designs

Suitcase Fusion 3With little exception, fonts can be the number one asset any designer owns, and the most difficult to manage.

The in-house graphic designer with a limited number of corporate fonts to use on a daily basis may need nothing more than Apple’s Font Book app (if even that) to manage a small font collection. But the freelance designer with dozens of clients, the ad agency production studio and the print shop with hundreds of clients must have robust font management or dealing with fonts can become a full-time job. For those users, Extensis offers Suitcase Fusion 3.
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Loads of free fonts for designers

Rather than contribute yet another blog post listing boat-loads of free fonts, I figured I would just shoot you a few quick links to other sites that list them.

Free font lists

Plenty of sites list free fonts in their blog posts

Smashing Magazine is a great site for finding lots of free resources. This posting lists 20 great fonts, but there are plenty more if you have the time to go through them.

Another cool site is InstantShift. Among the many free font lists available at InstantShift is this one listing 36 free fonts, and this one, listing 35 more fonts.

There are plenty of other blogs out there that list fonts available for free, requiring only a Google search to find them. Of course, you could always start with the king of all font sites, DaFont.

Free fonts: 50 spooky horror fonts

It’s a little early to start searching for horribly frightening Halloween fonts, but if you grab them now, you won’t have to search for them later this year when you’re in a hurry to put together the office Halloween party flyer that you will no-doubt be stuck doing yet again!

Horror fonts

At the very least, bookmark this collection of spooky horror fonts

Check out Hongkiat’s collection of 50+ Free High Quality Gothic & Horror Fonts.

FontCase update brings auto activation and more to elegant font manager

FontCaseBohemian Coding recently updated Fontcase, their beautifully Mac-like font management program.

A young application in the font management world, FontCase has gained critical acclaim due its stunning good looks, speed, stability and ease of use. The latest version adds to an already impressive list of useful features.

Version 1.5 of Fontcase brings the following updates to the program:

  • Font auto-activation
  • Duplicates Detection
  • Automatic import of missing fonts
  • Incremental export of both fonts and metadata
  • Improved speed, launch time and cache size
FontCase

FontCase 1.5 brings auto font activation

I’ve not tried FontCase, I’ve been an Extensis Suitcase user for many years and had no reason to try anything else. But with font auto-activation finally making its way into FontCase, and the server-like font sharing feature built-in, it might just be time to give it a try.

FontCase requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher, and costs $56 for a single user license. A demo is available for download.

Font changes coming to Mac OS X Snow Leopard

FontbookChris Foresman over at ArsTechnica comments on the upcoming font changes to OS X Snow Leopard. Among the many under-the-hood changes to OS X are the removal of Strong and Light anti-alias font Display settings. Medium will be the only option. And much to the delight of many designers, Apple is apparently getting rid of their proprietary dfont format. Taking its place will be a number of fonts in the TrueType Collection (.ttc) format. How font management applications like Suitcase Fusion will support this remains to be seen – however the .ttc format has been supported by the Mac OS since 8.5, according to Ars.

OpenType fonts are the cat’s meow

Back in the 90s I spent some time working pre-press for a service bureau. It was a rough time to work pre-press because RIPs were horrifically slow, just starting to get full postscript level 2 compatibility, and more often than not, simply choked on a document with more than 4 or 5 fonts. Back then, I had to deal with TrueType, three different types of Postscript fonts, Apple’s GX fonts, and Multiple Master fonts. Each brought its own unique brand of hurt. By far, the most reliable was Postscript Type 1. Thankfully, type 2 and 3 never really caught on, nor did Multiple Master fonts. TrueType had a rocky start – most RIPs couldn’t handle the single font file format – but eventually the format received wide acceptance and compatibility. Salvation came in 1996… (more…)

Hand-made fonts make a splash

I’m not much for gimmicky fonts. Sure, I like them, but I wouldn’t consider using them for anything beyond the family Christmas newsletter. But photo fonts are a different story. If done well, they can be creative, professional, and might be the cure for the creative cold-spell. HandMadeFonts is just what the doctor ordered. The site features over 100 photographic fonts. While some are cheesy at best, many are quite stunning, and might just fit in to your next project. Everything from lego pieces, baloons, and water drops to stitched leather, grass and animal fur. When you purchase these fonts, you’re actually not getting a font, you’re getting PSD files. Single fonts can be purchased using PayPal for as little as $13 each.

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