If you are tired of using the same google font in your ui design over and over and you don’t want to spend 100 or a few thousand dollars on a premium typeface instead you want one for free then I just might have the solution for you in today’s article.
Today we will look at some websites with curated lists of various typefaces that have that premium look but are entirely free for personal or commercial use so let’s go ahead and get started.
- Fontshare
The first website on today’s list is fontshare.com . I found this one recently and personally I really love the fonts on this website. A few typefaces that I’ve used so far are Satoshi, Clash Display – looks really good and stylized in bold, Switzer – is really clean and good on headings.
One of the things that I look for is a website that has fonts that have the ability to type in my own text change the theme a little bit, preview in different weights and sizes, and really get a feel for it before I download the font. There have been countless times I’ve downloaded a font thinking it looked good in my project and it looks absolutely terrible because I couldn’t really test it out by changing the style on the site. So that’s what I really like about a site like this.
On fontshare, once you have found a font, in the corner just click view family they have got a nice big bold preview of the font, and then you can scroll down and look at the various weights and even at the bottom they have a glyph view where you can really get into the details of the type. So, definitely checkout fontshare.com.
- Velvetine
Next up we have velvetine.fr and which is velvetine type foundry. This one’s got a lot of more experimental and unique and stylized fonts. A few that I’ve tried out from here are sligoyl, this one’s nice and trendy. It’s got ink traps on it, so I think even Figma’s website has an ink-trap font that’s very similar to that.
Another one is vg5000, I like this one because it’s got kind of a pixel art aspect to it and another one is Grotesque, this has broken s and there are a few characters that I really like in this, so it’s really good for like a minimal heading to make things stand out, but there’s a ton of various typefaces and unique styles at the bottom of the website, you can take a look at the full list of typefaces as well as the contributors and designers that created these on this site, I think they want you to credit the designer and the credits on your final project.
Again I recommend you check out the licensing for yourself just to double-check that once you have found a type that you like you can either download it in the bottom right corner or in the bottom left corner you can click on the name which will load up the page which is very similar to what I liked about the first website, where you can test out the typography. So definitely check out velvetine.fr.
- The League Of Moveable Type
The third one is theleageofmoveabletype.com. This one is another open-source font foundry but this one doesn’t have as big a selection as the previous two it still got that quality premium look to it with the typefaces that they do have. There are types in various different styles.
I really want to try it out kind of looks like it was created with a brush pen. I’ve used “Ostrich Sands” from the website. I really like how thin this type is. When you want to test out the typography you can just click on one of them and you got the nice big bold heading that you can edit, you can choose the different weights down at the bottom and you can download the font from the bottom right corner.
That’s going to do it for today’s list. This year with a lot of designs utilizing experimental typography and testing out alignment with different types, it’s got me really interested in changing things up instead of using the same typefaces over and over. So in doing so I’ve discovered these websites and I just wanted to share them with you. I hope you will be able to find some awesome font resources that have some nice premium-looking fonts that you can use in your projects for free.