Foundries/designers often promote themselves by releasing a free font. This drives traffic to their site and awareness to their brand/style. Below are examples of two quality typefaces I have come across recently, Lobster and Franchise Bold.
For more free fonts check out Font Squirrel. It seems that the fonts available have undergone a quality filter, which helps when you are used to searching through hundreds of crappy fonts at dafont.com.
Google just release the Google Font API and Google Font Directory to allow web designers a larger palette of typefaces to choose from when designing sites.
From the Google Code Blog: To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed.
I am excited to play around with IM Fell for my headers and sub-headers. I will dedicate a separate blog post about the API once I get the time to test it out for myself.
Also worth checking out is Smashing Magazine’s comprehensive list of helpful typography tools and resources for designers.
Edit: I was asked on Google Buzz what was so bad about dafont.com. Here is my reply: There are too many fonts on dafont.com that don’t offer or consider proper kerning, or ligatures, or alternate characters like the ampersand, or dollar sign. The fonts on dafont.com are nice for certain circumstances but it takes a long time to sift through the bad ones when you need a quality, well thought-out, multiple weight font.
Do you know of any other quality free fonts or type resources? Please share them with me!
