Downloading Fonts Anarchy
- Thread starter Crank Boy
- Start date
I am the font queen, not to be too modest about it. Here are a few sites that offer literally tens of thousands of free fonts. One even has links to other free font sites. I've culled an embarrassing number of fonts from the Internet over the years, but I'm a graphic artist so I don't feel like I have to admit that I have a problem...yet. 
Web Page Fonts
GoldenWebFonts An Italian site...NTTAWWT.
High Fonts Has tons of links to other free font sites. I can't vouch for all of them, however.
Web Page Fonts
GoldenWebFonts An Italian site...NTTAWWT.
High Fonts Has tons of links to other free font sites. I can't vouch for all of them, however.
graffiti
Anarchist
I am the font queen, not to be too modest about it. Here are a few sites that offer literally tens of thousands of free fonts. One even has links to other free font sites. I've culled an embarrassing number of fonts from the Internet over the years, but I'm a graphic artist so I don't feel like I have to admit that I have a problem...yet.
Web Page Fonts
GoldenWebFonts An Italian site...NTTAWWT.
High Fonts Has tons of links to other free font sites. I can't vouch for all of them, however.
Don't take this as me trying to be rude Bonnie. I'm not trying to sound that way.
Being in the design and prepress business for the last 15+ years, I can't tell you how many times I've seen systems bite the dust because of an innocent "free font".
I know typographers that create these things and there's no way I would put them on any machine I'd run.
You could get lucky sure but one day, you get the wrong one and BAM, either your applications all start crashing or you spend more money in print when the prepress folks have to clean things up.
Plus he was looking for a specific font that the foundry wouldn't give away for free. If I found it for free, there'd be good reason to be suspicious.
Thank you for the information. I'm sorry to hear about the problems many others of your acquaintance have experienced by not buying their fonts and utilizing free ones instead. Since you shared your background with me, I will say that after 20+ years in the design, prepress, printing, and bindery industries, I have never heard of this happening before. Obviously, I now count myself as extremely lucky not to have had any of these problems yet. However, when I do have a program or system crash I will certainly look to them as a possible culprit and will pass the word along to my current colleagues.
I only hope that Jon and cpp, who posted several links to free sites before me, will check back in on this thread so that they read your advice as well. Perhaps you should PM them?
Regards,
Bonnie
graffiti
Anarchist
For font management and editing, I use MainType and FontCreator by High Logic
I mostly work in CorelDRAW and Photoshop, but also use Pagemaker a fair bit as well. I'm planning to start doing more projects with Flash and GoLive, which is a lot of fun.
graffiti
Anarchist
I "think" Main Type is Winders only.
I've been experimenting a bit with Linotype Font Explorer at work (might as well wreck their machine instead of mine if things go south). Seems to do a good job for a freebee. I don't keep a ton of fonts on my computer these days since there's no need to have too many for my current work.
Before that, and at home, I use FAP (Font Agent Pro). General consensus is to stay away from the built-in FontBook that comes with OSX. It's crap.
I've been experimenting a bit with Linotype Font Explorer at work (might as well wreck their machine instead of mine if things go south). Seems to do a good job for a freebee. I don't keep a ton of fonts on my computer these days since there's no need to have too many for my current work.
Before that, and at home, I use FAP (Font Agent Pro). General consensus is to stay away from the built-in FontBook that comes with OSX. It's crap.
fontbook is crap, I end up not using it much. I don't tinker too much with fonts with this job unfortunately as much as I used to. I'm hoping that as we upgrade some of our lit the other designer and I will get to have a little more influence on the pieces. It's frustrating because the marketing gals get to design a fair bit of the everyday stuff and the other graphic desinger and I who are far more trained and qualified get to "proof" the stuff. It's a joke. How do you tell someone who has been given the job, "this word is mispelt and oh yeah, the whole piece is crap!"
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graffiti
Anarchist
Don't mean to laugh but yeah, that hits home.
I work for the state. Basically go in and straighten up their publications and web programs so they have products that are actually created to do the job intended rather than to appease the people that work there. My secondary goal is to save the agency money (which normally I can do without much effort).
It's typical to walk into an agency where the designer is someone that used to be an admin assistant but was promoted to the agency designer for no other reason than they knew how to pronounce Photoshop. I see it all the time.
The one I'm at now was almost laughable when I got there. You couldn't even tell that their pieces were created by the same person. No style at all. No connection between items that should be connected. What she DID do was pretty much anything they asked her to do whether it made sense or not. Result? a bunch of crap that did nothing for them.
Also, most of their jobs were 4-color with one, two, or three spots. Yeah, that's efficient.
I saved them roughly $150K last year once again, without effort. I'll put my mind to it this year and see if I can save them more.
proofeditwrite
Anarchist
Sailing K8 said:
"this word is mispelt and oh yeah, the whole piece is crap!"
Sailing K8 I think you will find 'mispelt' is misspelled.
And now you see why folk pay me $125/hour to proof their work BEFORE it is printed.
Maybe you would not be amazed at what I catch but the list is impressive: gerunds, misplaced modifiers, mixed metaphors, errors of fact, transpositions, widows, orphans, irregular page numbers, missing paras, incorrect punctuation, missing punctuation and lastly, but best, dull and boring writing and indecipherable cant peppered with three-letter acronyms (TLAs).
For 30 years I co-owned a M-1 and M-3 Berthold-equipped type studio employing three calligraphers, six typographers, four proofreaders and 20 assembly artists. When we couldn't match a face for a client we bought it or re-drew it or, using Icarus, if memory serves, reconstructed it. We endlessly modified faces with inlines, outlines, dropped shadows and rules and so on. I ran to work every day. It thrilled me to make an A.D. smile when he peeled the tracing cover back and revealed a piece we had worked all night to perfect.
Has that art gone the way of all flesh?
And while any decent Mac operator today could outperform all our combined efforts in quantity, for the life of me I cannot see an increase in quality. I mean The Book of Kells is a thousand years old but has it ever been bettered for sheer beauty?
I get nostalgic when I think of the art and craft of typography and weep tears when I see designers ripping off the efforts of others without at least paying homage to the creators.
Before Pcs and Macs I used to tell my students that every font they ever saw in any ad or design was once wet black ink on a piece of white board, created by a man's hand and his/her eye. They would stare up at me with disbelief as if what I said was a load of old bollocks.
Sic gloria transit mundi.
"this word is mispelt and oh yeah, the whole piece is crap!"
Sailing K8 I think you will find 'mispelt' is misspelled.
And now you see why folk pay me $125/hour to proof their work BEFORE it is printed.
Maybe you would not be amazed at what I catch but the list is impressive: gerunds, misplaced modifiers, mixed metaphors, errors of fact, transpositions, widows, orphans, irregular page numbers, missing paras, incorrect punctuation, missing punctuation and lastly, but best, dull and boring writing and indecipherable cant peppered with three-letter acronyms (TLAs).
For 30 years I co-owned a M-1 and M-3 Berthold-equipped type studio employing three calligraphers, six typographers, four proofreaders and 20 assembly artists. When we couldn't match a face for a client we bought it or re-drew it or, using Icarus, if memory serves, reconstructed it. We endlessly modified faces with inlines, outlines, dropped shadows and rules and so on. I ran to work every day. It thrilled me to make an A.D. smile when he peeled the tracing cover back and revealed a piece we had worked all night to perfect.
Has that art gone the way of all flesh?
And while any decent Mac operator today could outperform all our combined efforts in quantity, for the life of me I cannot see an increase in quality. I mean The Book of Kells is a thousand years old but has it ever been bettered for sheer beauty?
I get nostalgic when I think of the art and craft of typography and weep tears when I see designers ripping off the efforts of others without at least paying homage to the creators.
Before Pcs and Macs I used to tell my students that every font they ever saw in any ad or design was once wet black ink on a piece of white board, created by a man's hand and his/her eye. They would stare up at me with disbelief as if what I said was a load of old bollocks.
Sic gloria transit mundi.
proofeditwrite: I looked it up...
1. mispelt
A common Internet term used by the uneducated or ignorant to describe a misspelt word.
:lol:
ok ya got me there!
This place must hardly be a peaceful read for you!
...and yes the Book of Kells is gorgeous.
Grafitti: I saw a 3 page spread ad in a national Mag for the Commonwealth of Virginia that had a large pixelated logo on the main 2-page spread. I couldn't believe it. They had taken the logo from the previous page and simply blown it up. It was disgusting.
1. mispelt
A common Internet term used by the uneducated or ignorant to describe a misspelt word.
:lol:
ok ya got me there!
This place must hardly be a peaceful read for you!
...and yes the Book of Kells is gorgeous.
Grafitti: I saw a 3 page spread ad in a national Mag for the Commonwealth of Virginia that had a large pixelated logo on the main 2-page spread. I couldn't believe it. They had taken the logo from the previous page and simply blown it up. It was disgusting.
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graffiti
Anarchist
LOL. Yeah. I've seen that a lot.
Also seen folks use anything from images that they've downloaded from a web site ("Well, I used photoshop to upsample it to the proper resolution") to somp images with watermark intact. I've even had it happen in my own shop when I wasn't looking.
Just ran into another free font issue Friday. A client was trying to send a PDF to me with a layout they were interested in. Opened it up, fonts were all overlapped and of course when printed, I only got gibberish.
Seems the postscript in the font was wacked (technical term) and it couldn't be embedded properly. Had them replace it with a standard font and all is well this morning...
graffiti
Anarchist
Better yet, convert them to CS3.
Just got the suite last week for the Mac and the laptop. So far so good.
I'm so happy that I haven't had to use Quark since version 3. What happens when you try and print them directly out of Quark? What type of printer?
