Beautiful typography can distinguish your web design and development projects from the competition—an important edge if you work for an agency or as freelancer.
"After over a decade of unbearable waiting, false starts, and interminable doldrums, it’s just possible that 2010 may be spring-time for Web Typography," wrote author, consultant, and designer Jason Cranford Teague in a 2009 blog post. "A perfect storm of new techniques coupled with new Web browser capabilities promise to elevate Web Typography from its current monotonous state into an actual creative discipline, and this might happen more quickly than expected."
Perhaps the most promising of these new typographical techniques is the @font-face rule, which was recently discussed here in "Web Safe Fonts and Beyond: Embedding Custom Fonts in Your Development Projects". Thanks to improved browser support for this rule, it is possible to embed fonts in your website.
But embedding a font is only half of the problem, and finding fonts that fit your client's brand and budget can be no less challenging.
In this post, I have listed four of the best sites that offer free-to-use fonts for even commercial (ecommerce) projects. And many of these sites even package the fonts for use with the aforementioned @font-face rule.
Font Squirrel
When I visit Font Squirrel, I always give its advertisers a serious look. If there is a product I could use, I click. I do this because the free service that Font Squirrel is providing is so valuable that I feel compelled to pay attention to the sponsors that support it.
On this site you'll find large collection of fonts ready to be embedded in your project. In fact, when you download a font from the @font-face section on the site, it will come with a sample page that already has the CSS written for you. Just save a couple of files, cut and paste, and you're done.
Font ex
Font ex has an impressive collection of free fonts that you can add to your projects with just a little effort. The site also includes premium fonts, so make sure you know what you're looking at. Another neat feature is the "font test drive," wherein you can try out a font in a text box.
dafont.com
On this site, you'll want to pay careful attention to each font's license, as many are for personal use only. But it is worth weeding through the available free fonts to find some serious gems.
Webfonts.info
Of the sites mentioned in this post, Webfonts.info has the smallest collection of free fonts for use on commercial or ecommerce sites. But if "CA BND Bold WEB," "Graublau Sans Web," or "Pykes Peak Zero" is the perfect font for your project, this site will do the job.
