This may be a bit of an esoteric post but… I love fonts. I always have. This may be something of a nerdier post but… I have a sort of obsession for fonts. If you look through any application on my computer that has a font index (Pages, Scrivener, etc) you will find something along the lines of 700+ fonts. And I continuously add more. Part of my obsession has been fueled in large part thanks to websites like Dafont.com where you can find any font you could ever imagine and download it for free. There are millions and MILLIONS of fonts on Dafont and more are added daily. It’s sort of become a ritual for me that at least once a week (sometimes even more) I go onto Dafont and check out the new listings.
In recent months I’ve tried to find fonts that I really really love that are commercially free (that is to say fonts that don’t cost and you can use for commercial projects such as well… my book covers or any graphic design projects). Dafont has an option where you can check out Free and/or public domain fonts that you can use at your discretion for anything you could imagine, but another great website for free commercial fonts is a website called Fontsquirrel.com. Font squirrel has less of a listing than say DaFont but the good thing about FontSquirrel is that all the fonts are commercial free and you don’t have to do any special searches for those fonts.
As a graphic designer you learn that font choices can literally make or break any design, the wrong font or a font that is inappropriate for the design at hand can be a devastating blow… but what is the right font? What makes one font better than another for a certain project? Interestingly enough one font can be the right font but be used in the wrong way. For instance… if there’s too much of a separation between letters or not enough of one; can make all the difference in the world to a project. Generally speaking serif fonts (such as Garamond, Georgia and Times New Roman) are considered best for reading… well then why do a lot of blogs lately feature sans-serif fonts (like Helvetica, Arial and Verdana)? It seems to be more of a personal choice. I would prefer my website to be in something like Garamond (even though currently it’s Georgia) however a lot of my images that I make are made in Futura (as that’s currently one of my favorite fonts).
Design like almost all artforms is subjective. What makes something good design versus bad design is really at the discretion of its creator.
Thanks for the interesting information, I will definitely reblog this as my blog is about typography.
Always happy to help.Anyone who keeps people from using Comic Sans like yourself is clearly doing the graphic design gods work.
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