Why you should use free fonts

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The typeface you use shows who you are. Whether it's a website, app, prints, branding, etc. Many of us trying to find a font by seeing what others are using. Let's take Instagram website as a sample, they use Proxima Nova as their primary font.


Ah, that looks nice, let me use exactly like that one. When you decided to take a look at the price tag, it's a bit pricey — according to a junior designer like me, living in a third world country. The price of 144 fonts: $734.00 on desktop only, or if you buy only one font of the family, $29.00. You're not gonna buy only one font right? At least 3-5 fonts, so that will costs you around $100. Or $1,101.00 for 144 fonts for a website, or $7,707.00 for 144 fonts on an app. You won't really pay for 144 fonts, but you get the idea.

"It's just a font, how is it different from Arial, or Comic Sans (meh) that we got free installed?"

Designers spent a lot of time designing typefaces, it could be a year or several years. Sure he deserves a good pay for all the bills and time spent. I'm a typeface designer myself too and I know how tricky it is to make a good font.

"I still really need that font, and I don't think I should pay that much."

Some of us decide to pirate those fonts, try to free download those 'paid' fonts. Not a good move. First, you don't respect the designer, and we can't live without money.

Luckily there are many ways to get free fonts. For web-fonts use Google Fonts which is awesome, and there are a lot of websites like fontsquirrel.com that provides free fonts for real - not 'paid' made free.

Free doesn't mean it's not as good as the 'paid' ones. They got a lot of awesome hidden gems if you could find them! Just to name a few:
Quick tip: Use a font with four styles: Regular, Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic, but even a style will do according to how you use it. So good luck finding what you think suits best you needs and respect to typeface designers!

Laurensius Adi

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