Sources for Quality Libre Fonts

typography

Let’s say you’re working on a project that just doesn’t feel right clothed in your editor’s stock fonts. “Typography is what language looks like,” says Ellen Lupton. How can you find something that matches the character of your work? You’re not a client with hundreds of dollars to spend, but you want something with character, something full-featured or even experimental.

Here’s a list of some of the places I’ve been finding great open source (or “libre”) fonts. Many of these foundries and projects below publish typefaces not only as finished font files (.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.

Last Updated May 2022