Fonts

Windows doesn't require you to put all your fonts in the default fonts folder (e.g., C:\Windows\Fonts). You can store fonts anywhere. All you have to do is view the font (double click on it in Explorer or use a font viewer program like Font Lister, ak Font Viewer, The Font Thing, or FontSelector), and the little font selector control that's in your Windows program (like Word, Paint Shop Pro, PowerPoint) will automagically show the extra font(s) you're viewing right alongside the fonts that are in your default fonts folder. Cool, huh?

As a matter of fact, if you have too many fonts in your default fonts folder, you'll get yourself into trouble. Windows will start forgetting fonts, oldest first, which means all your windows and menus will turn into gibberish. The solution is to reinstall the fonts from the CAB files, but the real solution is to keep your default fonts directory lean and mean. We've currently got 225 fonts we can't do without in the default folder. You can do better.

And that brings us to the folder where you keep your extra fonts. Don't throw everything into one huge, disorganized directory where you'll never find anything. Set up some subdirectories by category (check some of the font sites below for good categories) so you'll be able to find a font when you need it.

To get the most out of the fonts you download, see our tutorial, Using Fonts on the Web.

A final note before we get to it: some sites (perhaps even some of these) have copyrighted fonts that they're distributing without license or permission of the authors. Please don't use those copies; support people who take the time to make excellent fonts.

Dingbat Crazy
A dingbat is any kind of symbol that isn't a number, a letter, or a punctuation mark. You may be familiar with Wingdings or Webdings, which are brand names for particular collections of dingbats. Dingbat Crazy has more than 1000 dingbat fonts, and since each font has up to a couple hundred symbols, that's a lot of symbols.
Acid Fonts
This is the link to their free fonts section. Some very usable fonts here.
Typophile
Articles of interest to font designers, font junkies, and people who want to get the most bang out of the fonts they use. Don't miss their found type section.
Free Typewriter Fonts
Lotsa fonts that look like they came out of a (sometimes seriously drugged) typewriter.
alt.binaries.fonts FAQ
There's a USENET newsgroup, alt.binaries.fonts, and their Frequently Asked Questions list is the first place to go (and the second, and the third) to go if you've got questions. If you aren't an old hand at downloading and installing fonts, this is the place.
Typographica
They say: Typographica is a daily journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design. We say: It's the next step on the road to serious font addiction.
The Fell Types - My Revival Fonts
Interesting almost-free fonts based on historical typefaces. No commercial use, must be attributed -- see the license for details. Beautiful.
Jason Kottke's Silkscreen Type Family
Used on a lot of web sites. Free.
Kadyellebee's Fonts Articles
A great set of articles from Kadyellebee's famous weblog. She's ferreted out some excellent sites. Posting a pointer to a meta-article (like I just did here) not only gives credit where due, it's a lot less work.
Font Magic
Thousands of fonts, arranged alphabetically and by category. Plus backgrounds, font programs, links, and design tips and tricks using Paint Shop Pro.
Jeff's Fonts and Dingbats
Over 100 original dingbat fonts, including the very useful Buttons and Switches
1001 Free Fonts
Perhaps even more than that.
Astigmatic One Eye Typographic Institute
Most of the fonts here are for sale (cheap) and there's a lot of very original fonts here. Well worth the money if you want your pages to stand out from the herd.
Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive
If you're writing in Hebrew, Navajo, or the non-Latin-1 languages, this is the place.
Chank Fonts
Very stylish, not like all the other fonts that are out there. The pay-for fonts are a little more usable, but if you've got the right match of text and font, the freebies are great.
Chi-Fonts
Some good, usable freebies.
The Dingbat Pages
Another site specializing in dingbats.
Divide By Zero Fonts
Tom Murphy's a grad student at CMU who's made some good quirky fonts. All freeware.
Floor 13 Fonts
Once you get past the annoying flash intro and squint at the blue-pencil color, there's some pretty good fonts here.
Fontalicious
Check the font families: not just the usual bold and oblique, but related fonts that go well together.
Font Empire
Lots of fonts, speedy site.
Font Fairy
Mostly a Mac site, but a great set of links to font foundry sites.
The Font Pool
More than 20,000 fonts.
The Font Ring
A webring of free and shareware font sites.
Fontz
(Germany)
Free Font Depot
(Japan) - Stylish (annoying) Flash interface, but it's got katakana and hiragana fonts.
Internet Type Foundry
Currently down. They promise to reopen soon.
Larabie Fonts
All original fonts by Ray Larabie, lots free. One of the first font sites on the web, and not improved one little bit by the new, hideous Flash interface.
Scriptorium
Another long-time site. Most fonts are for sale, not free, but their web fonts, Sirona, Divona, and Ounava, are free and very usable.
Robot Johnny's Free Fonts
We just discovered that the inventor of one of our all time favorite fonts, Girls Are Weird, is John Martz, and he's got even more free fonts on his site.
Keith Devens Programmer Fonts
Fonts especially designed to let you put lots of lines on the screen at once and let you clearly distinguish between 1 (one) and l (lowercase L), O (capital O) and 0 (zero).
WebFontList
They claim to have over 3,000 TrueType fonts, some free, some for sale.
Resurrection Song Free Font List
A meta list of sites with free fonts.
Griffin Interactive Free Fonts List
A meta list of free font sites.
WebpagePublicity.com Free Fonts
6500 free TrueType fonts.
Beautiful Fonts For Free
Not a large selection, but some very good looking fonts.
Programmers' Fonts
Tristan Grimmer's monospace fonts especially for console windows or text editors used for programming or displays of code listings. Free.
TypeNow Fonts
More than 6,000 free fonts.
Blambot Free Comic Fonts
Very readable fonts for comic-book style balloons and that "very carefully hand-lettered" look. Every last one of them probably better than comic sans.
Fontleech
A blog all about free (legal) font offers that turn up on the net. [RSS Feed]
Tim Burton Fonts
At the Tim Burton Collective. Fonts vaguely related to Tim Burton movies.
Essential Fonts for Designers
300 selected free TrueType fonts everybody should have, nicely categorized.
Music Band Fonts
At RockRage. Some of them are only vaguely related to the bands — e.g., they sorta look like something that was on one album — but still not that bad.
Search Free Fonts
Over 7,000 free fonts.
Common Fonts to All Versions of Windows
and Mac equivalents. This will really help. Most people know they can specify Courier New, Times New Roman, and Arial, but there's plenty more fonts Windows machines usually have on board. Just so long as you include the generic (e.g., sans-serif) specifiers, this ought to improve your pages considerably for most visitors.
Why You Should Avoid the Verdana Font
You see Verdana specified a lot in style sheets, but there are characteristics of that font that can cause you unnecessary problems on machines where the user doesn't have Verdana. Read this article and see what you need to be careful of. Here's another article called "Don't Smoke Verdana" that talks about some additional problems specifying Verdana can cause for your website.
http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/
By Codestyle. What fonts do most people have installed on their machines? There's a sample of fonts and a survey form so you can help them collect data.
1001 Fonts
Not 1001 free fonts, like the next one on our list, but all the ones we've seen are free. Go figure.

Name That Font

These sites can help you find a good match for a font you've seen in print or on a website. Note that most large corporations use custom designed fonts that they don't license to the public, so don't expect an exact match. You can still get pretty close, though.

IdentiFont
Answer a series of questions and it can identify a mystery font for you, or you can browse fonts.
What the Font?
Identifies a font from an image that has some characters from that font in it.
Mickey Avenue's Disney Fonts
Fonts (or the nearest they can figure to the fonts) used at Walt Disney parks and resorts.