Font free-for-all: Where to get free and low-cost fonts
Back in ancient times—throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s when just 1000 or so fonts were available for desktop computers—designers had a tongue-in-cheek saying among themselves: The one who dies with the most fonts wins! It made sense at the time because fonts were coveted by every designer as a creative resource of unparallelled importance, and prices were astronomical. While supply has risen and prices have dropped in more recent eras, one thing remains true today: Fonts remain incredibly important and valuable to anyone who puts words on paper or pixels.
Tiny programs
If your budget is low, or if you just want to experiment with a wide variety of type styles, check out the abundance of free and low-cost sources on the Internet. Warning: not all fonts are created equal. A font file that you install on your computer is actually a tiny program, with a variety of capabilities—including the ability to crash your applications.
Fonts come in three main formats: PostScript (Type 1) and TrueType are the oldest, and are fairly simple—but still capable of taking down your operating system. OpenType fonts can be far more complex, offering applications the ability to intelligently combine glyphs (characters) into new forms, add swashes to characters, convert combinations of numbers that look like fractions to true fraction characters, and so forth. OpenType is also capable of containing tens of thousands of glyphs, instead of the 256 limit of previous formats.
Aside from whether a font is programmed properly, quality is another issue. In some ways, crafting a font is similar to building a house. Anyone with a set of tools and some raw materials can put up a shelter that could be called a house. But the best houses are designed and built by people who have spent years studying and practicing the myriad techniques, history, styles, and materials. The same may be said about crafting fonts. Many masters around the world have devoted their lives to the true art of typeface design. Others are masters in crafting those designs into font files that you can use. Companies such as Linotype, Monotype, FontShop, and Adobe employ those masters to create the typefaces used by professional designers.
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