Why Free fonts?
Bottom line. Use free fonts so that they won’t cost your company anything to use them. With many of the top fonts in the world (think Helvetica or Gotham) you have to pay licensing fees. And depending on the usage – book, apps, website etc; you might have to pay quite a licensing fee. And no, you should not find illegal copies. This is wrong.
The thing about using fonts as a business is that you must have a license to use them. It is just how it works. Long story short, the designer of the font expects to be compensated for their hard work. So this means there are free fonts and there are free for personal use fonts. “Free for personal use”, like those available on 1001fonts.com are not to be used in your business documents. Because you have not purchased the rights to use them. The site might say free but they are not actually free. Also, many of these “free” fonts will miss out letters like the ‘E’ and will look wrong if you don’t pay. Often, they don’t even print well. Avoid sites like this.
The best place to go for free fonts for your website:
Google Fonts
These are all in the formats required for websites. Wonderful. Plus Google does a great job of giving you some font pairing options. These will work on all devices meaning they will always look wonderful but also you don’t have to worry about the user not having the font on their system to display correctly. Basically, websafe fonts is made redundant with Google Fonts. If you want to use a font that looks great and is free to use plus available of devices, use Google Fonts. The font will normally come with many variation of bold, italics, compressed too which is a bonus.
The best place to go for fonts to use in logos or on your computer:
Font Squirrel
When I am looking for free fonts, I don’t look anywhere else but here. The choice is wonderful. There is such a good range and they are all ready for commercial use meaning you can use them in all your business and marketing documents, or logo and branding.
Fontbundles.net
This website has many free fonts. They are a bit quirky and good for projects and branding. Not so much for document design. They have many paid options but there is always some free fonts available too. Make sure you read the license though to make sure you are okay to use it for commercial use.
What if I have a subscription to Adobe?
The Adobe Fonts system contains a huge range of top quality licensed fonts that are all bundled in with your subscription. Meaning as long as you continue to pay for the Adobe software (even if you only have Photoshop) you have access to all these fonts.
