Bryan Connor - Young and Freelancing

The reason I started offering free fonts on the web is that they really weren’t very good. When I was making fonts back in 1996, I didn’t have the skills. If you’re unlucky enough to happen upon an original release Larabie font, you can see for yourself . . ., if it doesn’t crash your application. Around 2001, my skills got to the point of, well let’s call it low-end professional. People might pay money for them but they’re weren’t up to the higher technical standards of some commercial fonts. That’s when I pretty much quit releasing free fonts. So I created a new brand, Typodermic and released fonts under that name. I migrated a few of the more popular fonts over to Typodermic and improved them while the original style (usually regular) was still free for commercial use. And even those early Typodermic fonts have been redone or are in the process of being rebuilt. All Larabie Fonts have been either updated or discontinued. Unfortunately, most free fonts sites still carry the older versions so as a free font user, you have to shop around.

So now, once in a while I release a free style just to experiment to see if it affects sales of larger families. It has some effect but not that much. I think it’s really hard to find good quality free fonts. They’re out there but few and far between. A couple of years ago, I made a site which featured what I thought were good free fonts.

But when I was making the font samples, I found that so many free fonts had bad spacing with no kerning or autokerning. The vertical metrics were set incorrectly so your text appear really tiny or clipped. I think the time you have to spend making free fonts look good should be a consideration. If you’re making a logo, you only have to manually adjust spacing anyway. So, bad spacing is pretty much irrelevant in that case. If you’re makign a magazine and all the headings are done in a display font, you need to spend so much time making adjustments to make it look presentable. For some fonts styles, like textured or grunge fonts, maybe spacing isn’t an issue, so in that case free fonts might be okay.

To answer you question: I think most free fonts are free for a reason. I think there are a few good quality free fonts but the majority are beyond use. I haven’t looked into it for about 2 years at least 2 years ago about one in 50 free fonts were worth considering.

Another consideration is overexposure. There are certain fonts I’ve made which have become popular and they’re just not cool. Everyone’s seen them a million times.

Fonts are fashion and there are times when it’s fine to wear Wal*Mart jeans and times when it’s not.

So regardless of its quality, the fact that it’s been overexposed makes free fonts inappropriate for tasks where you want to make an stylish impression. When I see my old Larabie Fonts being used on Ocean Pacific clothing, to me it looks tremendously uncool. If you walk through an Old Navy store, you can see plenty of uncool clothes with uncool free fonts. I’m not saying all old free fonts are uncool in the same way not all used garments in a thrift shop are uncool. But, most of them are so you really have to have a familiarity with what free fonts have been popular in the last decade or so. Some of my fonts are very unpopular and once it a while I see them used in a really creative way. If you look at Larabie Fonts at MyFonts.com, they’re automatically sorted by popularity so you can find some obscure ones near the bottom.

new.myfonts.com/foundry/Larabie/fonts/251-300/?tab=&uniquename=Larabie

Ignore the Typodermic fonts at the bottom of the list. Check out Failed Attempt. I’ve never seen it used but it was recently updated (check the glyph set) and, for a pixel font, it has some personality. President Gas has been improved and in the right context would make a nice poster font. Check Fragile Bombers too. The old version was so bad that nobody really used it so I don’t think most people would even recognize it as a free font. Now it has proper spacing, class based kerning, Central European accents, Vietnamese, math symbols, OpenType features for fractions, numeric ordinals and fractions. I think the quality is high enough to use it as a headline font in a magazine, yet it remains fabulously unpopular.  If you’re just grabbing the popular downloads from Dafont, you might be missing out of something more interesting. If you go to MyFonts  you’ll have less junk to sort through that your average free fonts site. Watch the price tags, not all the fonts that come up are free but you can find a lot of good ones. And don’t forget to check the end of the list for the probably less exposed fonts.
MyFonts – Lowest Price

Eric Olson – Process Type FoundryVisit the Process Type Foundry site or read about Eric Olson here
As with most things in the world, the reality lands somewhere in the middle so free or pricey misses most of the market. Most prices are pretty much in the middle for solid fonts. $39 to $49 for a single weight and $100 to $350 or so for a complete family. There are exceptions of course, but excluding the sub $39 fonts and the + $500 fonts leaves you with roughly the market.

Most free fonts are free for a reason:

1.) They are a promotion or enticement to buy the complete family. FontShop does this often.

2.) The designer doesn’t think much of the font but figures the effort might be of use to someone given that it’s free.

3.) Political or moral reasons. For example, a designer is motivated to bring language coverage and high quality designs to those who cannot afford it.

I should add – if this is implied in your question – the reason isn’t exclusively that they’re crap. Price isn’t a direct indicator of quality or quantity.

Have you or will you ever release a typeface for free?

I did once and regret it largely because I didn’t care about the design. It didn’t accurately reflect my intentions and outlook so I removed it. I’ve done the same with two commercial releases as well.

Bas Jacobs – UnderwareVisit the Underware.nl site or read about Bas Jacobs hereDo you think that most free fonts are free for a reason?

Yes. Everything has a reason.

Are there well designed and considered typefaces that are offered online for free?

Might be. Sometimes some fonts of a larger family are offered for free, to gain interest for the rest of the family.

What are they? Have you or will you ever release a typeface for free?

Yes. Unibody is very much free, at least for small use.

www.underware.nl/site2/index.php?id1=unibody&id2=info