Sources for Quality Libre Fonts
.ttf
, .otf
, .woff2
), but also include the source files (in .glyphs
or .ufo
) so that you can modify and customize your type.
Foundries
- Fontshare, a project from the Indian Type Foundry, which releases every fourth of its Latin typefaces for free.
- Velvetyne, an open source type foundry in France. Start with the list of their “workhorse” fonts.
- Bye Bye Binary, producing fonts with inclusive, non-binary glyphs for languages with grammatical genders. Includes proposed encoding under the Queer Unicode Initiative.
- League of Moveable Type, open source since 2009, producers of The Weekly Typographic podcast.
- Tunera Type Foundry, based in Paris, producing some very cool experimental stuff. Related: Fonderie.
Lists
- Badass Libre Fonts by Womxn, a collection created in 2018 by Loraine Furter
- Font Brief, a discovery site with a “free” toggle, as well as sliders for characteristics like elegant <-> rugged, serious <-> friendly, technic <-> organic.
Specific Typefaces
- EB Garamond 12, a digital revival based on the 1592 “Berner specimen.”
- Cormorant, a spindly and beautiful and weird Garamond-inspired typeface with mutliple variants.
- IM Fell, a revival based on the famous Fell types (1670s) originally gathered for use by Oxford University Press.
- Charter, distinctive terminals described as “chopped balls” that have been described as “iconic.” A screen font designed by Matthew Carter in 1987 for machines where disk space was tight.
- ET Book, the typeface used in Edward Tufte’s books inspired by Monotype’s Bembo.
- Computer Modern, designed by Donald Knuth in 1988 for use in TeX typesetting. Inspired by Didone.
Not Quite Free But Reasonable
- David Jonathan Ross’s Font of the Month Club, based on a subscription model.
- Future Fonts, selling fonts that are still under development from leading designers and foundries.
Other Resources
- google-fonts-webhelper, an open source tool for download any typeface hosted on Google Fonts in any format (ttf, otf, woff, woff2, even svg), so that it can be served locally.
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