I recently came across dafont.com, a great website for finding interesting fonts, many of which are public domain, free, or licensed under GPL or similar use licenses. The site should be of interest to anyone doing any type of design work – either online or in print. To give you an indication of the scope of the available fonts for download, here are the major categories and subcategories of fonts you can find on the site:
- Fancy Fonts:
- Cartoon
- Comic
- Groovy
- Old School
- Curly
- Western
- Typewriter
- Curly
- Western
- Eroded
- Old School
- Eroded
- Stencil
- Initials
- Distorted
- Destroy
- Horror
- Fire, Ice
- Decorative
- Army
- Various
- Grid
- Foreign Look Fonts:
- Chinese, Japan
- Roman, Greek
- Arabic
- Russian
- Mexican
- Various
- Techno Fonts:
- Square
- LCD
- Sci-fi
- Various
- Gothic Fonts:
- Medieval
- Modern
- Celtic
- Initials
- Various
- Basic Fonts:
- Sans Serif
- Serif
- Fixed Width
- Various
- Script Fonts:
- Calligraphy
- School
- Handwritten
- Brush
- Trash
- Graffiti
- Various
- Dingbats:
- Alien
- Animals
- Horror
- Games
- Shapes
- Logos
- Music
- Asian
- Ancient
- Bar Code
- Nature
- Sport
- Sexy
- Army
- Runes, Elvish
- Esoteric
- Fantastic
- Heads
- Kids
- TV, Movie
- Various
- Holiday Themed Fonts:
- Valentine
- Easter
- Halloween
- Christmas
- Various
The above lists should give you an idea of the scope of the possible font downloads – more than 9000 fonts and growing everyday.
Among the other features of the site is some basic help on how to install a font and a list of font creation tools. (Who knows? Maybe you’ll want to submit a font of your own creation to the site.)
Too bad I didn’t know about dafont.com when I was putting together the video montage of photographs I created for my graffiti, tag, mural, and street art blog — it would have been supercool to use some graffiti fonts for the titles and captions in the video. Next time!
One thing I don’t like about dafont.com is that it’s not quick and easy to filter results by license. For example, it would be great to be able to click on something and get a list of all public domain fonts available for download on the site. This is not a major criticism though, since many sites that include content with varying content use licenses also don’t make it easy to filter by license.
Click on advanced search dude. You can easily select which fonts you want by license while browsing.
Hi, Dirty Logic!
Thank you for pointing this out for me – just a UI design issue – I couldn’t find the “advanced search”.
When looking for fonts, there are some options available just under the paging. After the submit button is a text-link titled “more options”. Click on this link and you’ll be able to select fonts by license (e.g., public domain only). This is the “advanced search” that Dirty Logic mentioned in his comment.
Thanks again!
All the best,
M.E.B.