Font-o-ville is a Dutch foundry offering some cool, original retro fonts for download. I like The Bends and the Orpheus family, a nice sans serif package that seems a little out of place thematically (not that I’m complaining). The site’s been lying dormant for a year and half, so who knows how long these fonts will be available.
Jack Usine’s SMeltery is a site I wish I’d found much sooner than this morning. Jack has designed some experiemental (yet very usable) fonts with the kind of craftsmanship rarely seen in the free font world. My favorite of his free fonts include ALusine, AUdimat, GAzole (pictured), KEbab and REdevance.
Jurgen Vanbrabant gets a big shout out for pointing out the site. Check out Jurgen’s stuff at brantt.be and hipatrip.com.
And I apologize for not having a bunch of lame April Fool’s posts like everyone else. I just wasn’t thinking ahead!
Kosuke Yamada is a Japanese type designer with a few free fonts available on his site Petitboys (?). Transport X and Funky House are nice, but Highway Star (the original, not the 2003 version) is definitely my favorite.
Comic book lettering used to be done in pencil and ink, right on top of the artist’s original drawings. This process wasn’t just slow, it was dangerous. One slip-up could ruin an entire page’s worth of work. These days, almost all comic letterers do their work in software like Illustrator where they can throw down speech bubbles and do their actual lettering as fast as they can cut and paste dialogue.
Of course, fanboys aren’t ready to see Wolverine’s cantankerous quips set in Futura, so a cottage industry of comic book type design has developed. Blambot offers a ton of their professional-grade lettering fonts for free, as well as some nice “sound fx” and “headline” typefaces.
Also very useful is their .eps file of speech bubbles which, if nothing else, can make for some entertaining photo captions for all those Easter pictures.
Thanks to the approximately one million people who have emailed me about Blambot since Fontleech’s very first day on the web.
Dutch designer Koen Hachmang has unleashed some great free fonts on the web in the past few years. I like Base and Zygoth, but Neophyte is just plain slick. It’s too bad the FNAC font (based on Neophythe) on his splash is a custom job; I like it even better. There’s a lot of stuff to look at here, but be warned: Koen’s site features just the sort of Flash inteface that makes some of you want to slit your wrists.
Hopefully this link from Jason Fields will make up for the Zone Erogene fiasco:
Eutypoce offers the awesome Sukplena family for free download. If that isn’t enough for you, check out both flavors of Val Blanc and all of their great pixel fonts.
Getting an entire family of Sukplena’s quality for free is almost unbelievable. Don’t sleep on this one! And be sure to reload this page in five minutes to see how stupid I end up looking when it turns out Eutypoce is really a black market baby/bootleg DVD ring.
Zone Erogene has some excellent free fonts and a strange love of mixed cases. Most of their fonts feature upper and lowercase letters thrown together into a bizarre orgy of casing. If you can get past that (like me), check out Arrière Garde, C Dans L’air and the Migraine family.
Update: Never trust the French. Links removed, see Stephen’s post in the comments.
Fenotype is a Finnish type foundry offering a ton of interesting freeware fonts. I downloaded 10.10, Digital Kauno, Linja and Tantor. And for those of you concerned about commercial usage, check out their info page:
Freeware fonts are free to use in both commercial and noncommercial work. Despite that a donation of 20 € or sending one piece of the product where the font has been used is the best way to say thanks.
Okay, that was really just an excuse to use a blockquote. Sorry.