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.
FontShop is offering GreenbriarSE, a font which distills blackletter “to its essence, in crisply defined forms.” It’s only online for a month, so grab it while you can!
No new foundry links today, but check out Cameron Moll’s article The Non-Typographer’s Guide to Practical Typeface Selection. Here’s his simple formula:
1. Make a list of those “familiar” typefaces that you trust.
2. Supplement that list with a list of “unfamiliar” typefaces.
3. Test each typeface at small and large sizes.
4. Test both caps and lowercase.
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.
codeman38 has another Japanese foundry for us: Add. Like Digital Dream Design, they have a nice selection of free vector and bitmap fonts (if you aren’t sick of those yet). Check out Cityboy and Loops, as well as all the pixel fonts.
Cody made a point that I agree with completely: it’s incredible that so many of these Japanese foundries with amazing free fonts are flying completely under the radar. But why? It’s not like they’re hard to find. Are people put off by Japanese sites? Is a .jp domain name and the chance of some garbled characters really that scary? Especially when the payoff (tons of great free fonts) is potentially huge?
Maybe. But I think the answer is simple: nobody wants to look too hard. I’m sure most people searching for free fonts don’t go beyond the second or third page of spam-clogged Google results or the same old heavily-linked sites we’ve all seen.
But that’s why you come here, right? So it all works out.
codeman38 (whose work we have already covered) sent me links to a couple more Japanese foundries with free fonts. One of my favorites is Digital Dream Design. Though their interface is definitely tough to work your way through, the patient surfer can find some great stuff there like Naturalism (pictured). If I had known about them a couple of weeks ago, I definitely would have included them in the Pixel Font Blowout. Their bitmap fonts are right up there with the best.