Sawse - Stir it Up!

Sometimes it is hard to say whether a good font makes a successful design, or whether a good design makes a font successful. Either way, fonts are an essential part of web design and too often overlooked or quickly chosen. The right font can make or break an overall layout! With that in mind, these 11 sites are great places to find fonts, font inspiration and font-related tools.

Creamundo is a fantastic and user-friendly place to download free fonts. The font collection is organized logically and the fonts themselves are easy to preview both as an entire alphabet and with test words. They also span the spectrum from elegant to offbeat. Another extensive and also previewable set can be found at ShowFont.

Urban Fonts has a nice series of semi-offbeat fonts that are, for lack of a better description, all urban in some way. Some of them reinvent or reinterpret classical fonts, while others are playfully new. A likewise strange but different collection can be found at Abstract Fonts or at Better Fonts.

SimplyTheBest has an interesting and helpful organizational system that makes them well worth a mention for any font-seeker. They have organized their fonts into a series of fairly convenient categories such as “for kids” and “stylish fonts” that are more intuitive than a strictly alphabetical system. Another site with a similaly intuitive though different set of categorizations can be found at 1001 Free Fonts.

Mike’s Sketch Pad has a collection of fonts that are “from font designers who offer their creations as either freeware, shareware or emailware. Below is a help screen to help you understand what’s in the archive.” Each font is listed in alphabetical order and provides links to the creator’s information.

Modern Life has a great collection of successful contemporary fonts on major websites. “Fonts are an essential part of design - but there are thousands of fonts out there, so knowing which ones to use can be quite daunting. Here’s a roundup of some fonts that have found popularity recently.” Some other quite nice and similarly mostly modern/contemporary fonts can be found at Fawnt.

TypeTester is a great way to try out and see how different fonts will render on the screen in various type styles. Though their font collection is somewhat limited to mainstream fonts this is a very useful tool and in general can help you get a sense of what to expect in terms of on-screen rendering differences.

Tags: fonts, free, graphic design, web design