Best Places to Download Free Fonts

If your typography budget's a bit stretched, the web's full of places where you can download free fonts.

But where to begin? We've done all the legwork for you and gone in search of the best free font resources that'll deliver the goods you need without wasting your time. Hit up any of the following sites and you're likely to find just the free font you're after in short order.

Creative Market

An online marketplace for community-generated design assets, Creative Market offers a selection of free goods each week – including one free font. The design changes each week and is only available for a limited time period. Because the fonts on offer here are typically paid-for, you know you're getting a good quality product. This is a brilliant way to build up a library of different font styles, and if you do want to buy something on Creative Market, you can often unlock more free fonts and other goodies with qualifying purchases.

DaFont

DaFont is a massive archive of freely downloadable fonts. Browse by alphabetical listing, style, author or popularity. A lot of it is on the unprofessional side, but you can find some choice stuff here. It's also a good resource if you're looking to download free fonts with a novelty theme.

Font Squirrel

Want to download free fonts for commercial use? Then Font Squirrel is the place to head. The quality of the fonts is high, they're mostly @font-face compatible, plus it's got fun features like the Font Identifier, where you can upload an image with type and it'll tell you the fonts that match.

FontSpace

With over 38,000 fonts available, FontSpace is a useful go-to for free type. The fonts here are neatly sorted into plenty of categories to help you root out what you want – alongside the typical 'serif', 'script' (and so on) categories are fonts designed for a particular occasion – ideal if you're not quite sure what you're looking for. 

FontSpace has over 2,500 designers supplying fonts, and they're clearly labelled so you can be sure whether a font is good for commercial use or should be consigned to personal projects only.

Google Fonts

Google Web Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts on its site. All of the fonts are open source, so you're free to share and customize them for your own use, or collaborate with the original designer to improve them. And you can use them in every way you want, privately or commercially: in print, on your computer, or in your websites.

If you already have a font in mind, and don't want to spend hours scrolling, you can always do an image search. My favorite tool is WhatTheFont. Read more about how it works.