Free Font Archives & a Tip

Unique fonts in your logo or images can really make a statement. These archives are a few of my favorites to visit when I'm looking for inspiration.

Tip: Remember, if you use a font in your html or css code that your visitors doesn't have installed... it will default down to the closest (and that may not be pretty). To try to keep some control over your presentation, you can use multiple fonts in css to try to choose which will show up and it's always a good idea to add at the end a generic font type, for example sans-serif.

Here's an example:

<span style="font-family: isadoracaps, arial, verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;">Your prettied up writing</span>

Most people won't have Isadora Caps font on their system, so they will usually see arial or if not that, verdana. Helvetica is there for your Apple computer users and sans-serif is just a general hint to their computer to not default down to a serif font like times new roman.

Urban Fonts
I'm really quite impressed by this site, it's very easy to navigate, no annoying popups or in-your-face adverts and there's a ton of really great fonts and dingbats available... and a lot are free. The commercial fonts are in a separate category so it's easy to find exactly the type you need. They also have a great preview system so you can see before you install or even download that the typeface is the style you want and which characters are available in the set. Most that I saw are available for both Windows and Mac. Very nice, this is one of my new favorites!

1001 Free Fonts
A huge collection of freeware and shareware fonts and dingbats for you to download. They're all clearly marked, so you know if they are freeware or shareware before you download (a nice touch, not all font archives do that).

Acid Fonts
450 + freeware and shareware fonts, updated and added to weekly! From funky to formal, he has them all. They are all zipped so it's much faster to download, and instructions on how to install them are given.

The Font Pool
A searchable collection of over 57,423 truetype freeware and shareware fonts, (they let you know before download which they are.)

Online Font Browser
This handy online tool lets you browse through all the active fonts on your system and actually see what they look like quickly and easily. You can either use their prewritten characters to test, or write your own phrases, words or letters. It is a flash application, so you will need to have that installed and enabled to use it but it's well worth it, nicely written, very fast and totally free.