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Best Free Font Resources
Posted by Ben on December 14th, 2009Below you will find a list of the best free font resources that you can use to add a touch of creativity to your web pages.
Search Free Fonts
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/
Search Free Font’s has an impressive archive of over 13,000 fonts! The sections are well categorised, with the added option to browse by letter. With every font style you have the ability to type your own text to generate a preview of how it renders, which is a nice way to test before you download. There is also the option to rate and review each font style.
DaFont
http://www.dafont.com
An extensive resource of fonts with various licensing options. I like DaFont for it’s clear layout and navigation which allows you to browse fonts with ease. DaFont has a strong user base with new fonts being added regularly, you also get to make comments and also browse fonts by author. You can preview each font style before you download by adding your own custom text and checking whether it’s suitable or not.
1001 Free Fonts
http://www.1001freefonts.com/
A popular resource of free fonts, each with a large preview of the typeface. 1001 Free Fonts has always been a great resource, but it’s starting to get overshadowed by newer font libraries. If you’d prefer not to spend countless hours downloading fonts, 1001 Free Fonts allows you to download the entire library for $19.99.
Identifying Fonts – What The Font?!
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
This is my favourite tool for helping to identify font sets that otherwise would go unfound. What makes it so good is it’s complete ease of use and impressive accuracy on the results. You simply upload an image/screenshot of the font (the clearer the better) and What The Font!? will work it’s magic and tell you what that font set is or its closest match and also how to get it.
Embedding Fonts
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/
Use sIFR to embed font’s into your webpage, this method uses modern technologies to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in thetypeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. Great if you wan’t to add a touch of creativity to your h1 tags!
Website Colour Scheme Inspiration & Tools
Kuler
http://www.adobe.com/products/kuler/
Kuler has been the preferred choice of many web designers (including myself) for creating the perfect colour scheme for quite some time now. Kuler contains thousands of user generated colour palettes, which you can use straight away or modify to your needs. New themes can be created from just one or multiple colours, with the added ability to upload an image to Kuler, which analyses and extracts the colours it contains to create a new theme. You can also engage with the Kuler community by rating and reviewing colour schemes.
Colour Lovers
http://www.colourlovers.com/
Colour Lovers is an amazing design resource which is built around a very active community of colour enthusiasts. Amongst the vast collection of schemes available you’ll find a wealth of information on current design trends & patterns. If you’re looking to do more than creating a new palette for your site and want to get involved with a community dedicated to colour and design, then I would certainly recommend taking a look at what Colour Lovers can offer!
Color Scheme Designer
http://colorschemedesigner.com/
I consider this a “Light” version of Kuler, where you can quickly create colour schemes and export your final palette in various formats, including html/css. This allows you to quickly and efficiently copy & paste the hex values of each colour so you can apply it to your design.
Useful Firefox Addons
ColorZilla
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/271
An extensive colour picker, advanced eyedropper and palette viewer that allows you to extract and work with colours found on websites with ease.
Features include:
Find out what CSS rules specify a given color
Eyedropper – get the color of any pixel in the browser window
Color Picker similar to ones found in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro
Palette Viewer and editor
Webpage Color Analyzer
& Many, many more.
ColorSuckr
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13383
ColorSuckr allows you to right-click any image on the web and extract the 12 most common colors from it. You can then build color schemes from the results.