The GAB

The Folks at Free Geekery, sent an e-mail to alert me to the fact that they have a mighty list of 101 type faces for Designers. These are all free type faces, although several ask for credit or permission if the font is used commercially.
Grunge
Handwriting
Familiar
Tech
Unique
Fancy
Bold
Clean and Simple
Simple with a twist
Oddly, Free Geekery, is the blog page for a "[Reward] Credit Card eduction" website.

A friend asked me the other day where he could find some fonts that would not cost an arm and a leg. There are many free font websites, most of them with limited and terrible collections but here are a few that are worth a look next time you need something different on a low budget:



Then there are also free, but quality fonts as in these collections (If you use them commercially, give them a donation):

In my continuing search to find what I would consider the ultimate (widely usable and visually pleasing) san serif, I think I've come to a conclusion. Over the years I've spent looking, I've settled for a while on Frutiger light. A lovely face sure, but a few years later I discovered Myriad and fell in love with the fluid, clean lines of Myriad Pro Light. Lighter than Frutiger and more lyrical when set, with those exquisite, almost imperceptible caligraphy-like thinning in area's like the shoulder of the n, p, r, q etc... I've tried Vectora Light, Lucida Sans (too square) of course Helvetica light and several others, but I keep coming back to Myriad. I realize that what I want is Myriad, with a double-story, lowercase g that has a loop and link like the one in Agenda and Freight (below), and a little more "swing" in the lower case a's tail, also like like Agenda. Know of any faces that might fit the bill?

So my favorite go to san serif is Myriad Pro (especially the light face). I love it's clean lines, it legible characters and it almost melodic flow - especially compared with the standard of san serif fonts, Helvetica. There's another face that I think is also fascinating, simpler and more modern looking than Myriad: Phoenica designed by Ingo Preuss. Arguably, because it's more simplified, it's not as legible as Myriad, for instance the lower-case a has no tail the lower case g has no ear etc... But the face maintains a lovely, albeit, subtile, rhythm. I'm looking for a project to use this face.

I had a job the other day that used a typeface I thought I recognized, but for the life of me I couldn't place it. I remembered that MyFonts has this handy little tool called "What the font" that can help you figure out what font you're looking at. All I had to do was take a screen shot (Command-3) open it in Preview and crop the just to the words I wanted (You need to keep the image - jpg is best - to only a few items so the scanning software can pick out the letters easily). Then I uploaded my jpg to What the font, and it scanned the image, split it into separate letters and then asked me to identify the letters. Click Search, and in just seconds, I got my result. A really neat tool.