free fonts

Friday Focus 04/22/11: Designs for Designers

April 22, 2011 By Sophia Lucero

This week’s Friday Focus is a little meta: a combination of useful guides and tools geared towards designers and developers all wrapped in inspiring designs.

Designs of the Week

Interface imitation clearly at work here, but note how the famous checkered pattern is blurred a little to make the foreground more readable. Nice integration of share buttons into the “toolbar”.

While the site looks elegant and minimal, I’m getting more and more allergic to text typeset in all-caps, narrow fonts as much as I do with ones set in Comic Sans.

Not a bit of detail left unturned here. Love how the Twitter and Facebook buttons are integrated as stamps on the foot of the crate.

I like the progress bar-style approach to the site, the only thing that feels off is moving a step backward uses the same animation as moving forward.

I feel like the vintage touch that’s become popular lately also facilitates wit in copy and other user experience areas. Just look at the logo!

Simple and striking enough; I hope to see more fonts offerings here.

Not only is this site a great tool, but it’s a great idea for promoting the book it’s based on.

I love the combination of the old school watercolor paintings of the countryside combined with fairly modern interface touches.

Social Media Weekly

CSS – Faking float: center with Pseudo Elements

CSS – 39 Ridiculous Things To Do With CSS3 Box Shadows

CSS – CSS3 Patterns Gallery

CSS – Safe CSS Defaults

10 Free High Quality Fonts and Icons

November 29, 2010 By Hyde

I came across a selection of icons and fonts that are not extremely popular yet. These icons and fonts are of super-b quality. Picto Foundry for example is optimized for the retina display on iPhone 4 and for use on the iPad. There is also a commercial selection available.

Discons and Minicons are excellent minimalist icons, a total of 953 icons together.

With the Holidays coming up the Matilde font is ideal to create some greetings cards, and if you rather have a more sturdy design the other fonts are perfect for it!

Make sure to bookmark of download these fonts and icons, because they are to good to pass up.

Icons

500 Free Icons: WPZOOM Social Networking Icon Set

Free icons

WPZOOM Developer Icon Set (154 free icons)

Free icons

Picto Foundry Free

Free icons

Discons

Free icons

This icons package currently costs $3, which is nothing compared to the prices of other commercial icons.

Minicons

Free icons

When opting for a minimalist design the typography is very important. Typography is always important but with a minimalist design the focus is more so on the content then on a graphic heavy design. The font you choose sets the tone of your design.

June 10, 2010 By Hyde

Typography can make or break your design. There is like a bottomless resource of fonts on the internet but only a handful are good. Of course this also depends on how it’s implemented. Times New Roman has been used so much that everyone is tired of it, but Simon Collison has shown how an old and tired font can still make a great design.

There are great fonts available free and commercial. I have compiled a list of the fonts that have caught my eyes that are free or reasonable priced.

Free fonts

Jos Buivenga is a well known type designer, there are several well known websites and even a book that uses one of his types. I’m starting with my current favorites from his collection that has at least one type for free. Calluna and Fontin.

Calluna

Fontin

Modata

Porcelain

Nuvo Web Medium

ff_nuvo_web_medium_390

Just Old Fashion

JustOFashion

District Thin

Commercial fonts

I listed a few commercial fonts ranging from 20 to 60 dollars per type, while they do cost money you get a complete font package in most cases. If you do design for work or are planing to it’s a good idea to invest in commercial fonts especially if they come with multiple licenses.

Solomon

40 dollars for one style.

Billboard

19.95 dollars for one style, considering Billboard is perfect for headers and large type I would only buy the regular one.

Alright Sans

Al Right Sans

Only thing I have to say about this fonts is that I love it. When I look at it it gives me the itch to design something, anything just to use this font.

40 dollars for one style.

FF DIN

FF DIN is an old font in web years, it was designed in 1995 by Albert-Jan Pool. FF DIN has become enormously popular the last couple of years, being used by companies such as JetBlue Airways and Adidas.

Considering how classic and popular this font is, 59 dollar for the regular type is nothing.

Bitmap fonts

You can’t miss having at least a few bitmap fonts to use.

Silkscreen

Silkscreen created by Jason Kottke must be the webs most famous bitmap font and best of all it’s free!

Bitmap

bitmap

Several variations of Bitmap pixel fonts.

8 Free Classically Beautiful Fonts For Weddings

June 7, 2010 By Lorraine

It’s June, the month for weddings, which are, I’ll admit, one of my favorite things to design for. From Save the Date cards, to invitations, to reply cards, to programmes and menus- Stationery design is a wonderful way to set the tone for your Wedding day.

Which brings me to today’s post. These romantic fonts are elegant, render beautifully, and are all free to download: