Dear Amigos,
Our Open-Source type foundries article is one of our most successful ones. Finding free fonts directly from the creators website, where all the licensing details are available can be a huge creative and legal relief. Besides, learning more about the story of each font we download, as well as meeting the designers enriches the creative process. Their stories can inspire users to credit and share their work, generating a transparent creative cycle.
Today’s internet is truly wide, and there are thounsands of amazing open-source fonts waiting for us to pick them for our next project. That’s when a second hero comes along in our story: font curators. Designers and creatives that, through their unique input and taste, build stunning, easy to navegate libraries where we can filter fonts from many different places. These libraries can feel more adjusted to our own browsing preferences and lead us to our next favorite font. Let’s check out some of our favorites.
1. UNCUT.wtf
UNCUT.wtf is a Libre font catalogue recopilating contemporary type. Their website prioritizes the basic traits of each font as well as the licensing info in an easy and nostalgic way. They also have ventured on their own type foundry, Uncut Type, releasing their own open-source font called Uncut Sans (we have it featured in our library). Visit their website here.
2. Free Faces
Free Faces, created by Simon Foster, collects free typefaces and displays them in a very aesthetically pleasing way, mixing each font with colorful backgrounds and photography. Easy to navigate and beautifully designed, you can check out their library here.
3. Open Foundry
Open Foundry‘s web experience feels like a poster generator inside a website. Their careful choice of font styles allows us to rediscover classic typefaces we might take for granted. They’re currently working on a 2.0 version of their library. Follow their journey here.
4. Use & Modify
Use & Modify is Raphael Bastide’s corner of different kinds of typefaces, from classy to incomplete and weird. All of them, according to their licenses, are free to use and modify. Their easy browsing experience and quirky selection makes you feel like you’re navigating the entire landscape of libre fonts in seconds. Go through their selection here.
Beautiful Web Type goes straight to the point: a guide to only the best open-source typefaces. Curated by Chad Mazzola, it offers a stunning website carefully displaying each font’s quirks, highlighting ligatures, ordinals and special characters. A true wonder for typography lovers. You can check the collection here.
Curated with gender lens in mind, this collection seeks to visibilize womxn designers and their contributions to the libre ecosystem. It’s the sister project of Bye Bye Binanary, one of the great open-source typefoundries we featured in our article. You can browse their library here.
7. Fontain
Fontain is a manifestation of the libre font movement, improving the access to free to use, study and modify fonts. It was developed to group a selecion of open-source fonts collecting their source files, specially aimed to web designers and developers. This website was created by LafKon Publishing and Github. Fontain was inspired by Use&Modify, you can take a look at their place here.
If you’re not looking foward leaving our website, we have our own free font hub where we’ve been curating open-source fonts since last year. We’ve collected over 90 fonts from our favorites corners of the internet, always linking back to their original source. We are committed to sharing quality content and resources that will help creatives become the best versions of themselves, and that will nourish and support the community. Look through our font collection here.
We hope that you bookmarked some cool websites for your font-scrolling hours. Remember to give some love and credit to these creators and type foundries that work so hard to deliver extraordinary open-source fonts, Goodbye, Amigos!
Since you are really into typography, you might be interested in these other articles and resources:
Best 7 High-Quality Free Fonts for Designers in 2024
Best 7 Y2K fonts filled with digital nostalgia – Free Download
