The right font can make or break a logo, from exclusively typography-based logos to illustrative logos where fonts are exclusively used in the brand name. While working with commercial fonts makes the job of designing a logo often easier, there are plenty of excellent free fonts out there. Let’s take a look at some of the best sites to download free fonts for your next logo design project.
Why typography is so important to logo design? Well, if you take some time to research some of the most well-know logos in the world, you will find to no surprise that the great majority of these logos are indeed typography-based logos.
There are way more places to find free fonts on the Internet than the sites we are listing below, but this list is likely to provide you with 99% of the free fonts you will ever need when designing a new logo. These are the very best sites to find free fonts for your logos. Enjoy.
What Should You Consider Before Working with Free Fonts
The very first thing to keep in mind is that using a free font doesn’t necessarily means you can do anything you want with it.
The majority of free fonts you will find online are made available under a limited license, and usually that means you are limited to use them for your own personal projects. That doesn’t mean that there are fonts free for commercial use, but it does mean you have to pay close attention to that.
Just be sure to comply with the license agreement that comes with each font before using them in your projects, and you will be just fine.
Now, without further ado, here are the very best sites to download totally free of charge fonts:
Google Fonts
Google Fonts is one of the very first sites that come to mind when talking about free fonts. As you would expect, like anything else that is built by Google, this site has one of the most impressive free font libraries anywhere on the planet. With more than 900 font families, you are bound to find the exact font you are looking for your next logo design project.
What many people don’t know is that you can download every font you find in Google Fonts. All you have to do is to browse through the fonts and click on “Add to Collection” for any font you like. After selecting all the fonts you would like to use, you will be able to download them all in a zip file containing fonts in .otf and .ttf format.
It is worthy to say that all fonts in Google Fonts library are available for use online, and while not a feature particular to logo design projects, if you use a font from this site on your next logo project for a client, this same font could also be used straight on your client’s website as well.
The very best about Google Fonts is that these fonts are distributed under an open-source license. In short, you can do anything you like with them.
Font Squirrel
Font Squirrel is one of the most popular free font websites in the world, and thanks to the combination of an easy-to-use interface and a vast library of commercial use free fonts, it is easy to understand why so many designers think of Font Squirrels as their first choice of free fonts website.
On the right-hand side of each page you will find all sorts of filters to help you search their font library. Font Squirrel organise fonts by categories, styles, and even languages, making it super-duper easy to find the right font for your next logo design project.
And if you aren’t happy enough with the fonts offered in the free section, Font Squirrel has an “Almost Free” area with premium fonts sold for a fraction of their original price. That might just help you get hold of that elusive font you so much need to bring your design project to the next level.
If all of that is not enough, they even have a font identifier, all you have to do is to upload an image and it will identify its match for you.
DaFont
DaFont is the grandfather of all free font download websites. It was built back in the early days of the Internet and it has amassed a massive archive with almost 50,000 fonts since its creation. Their fonts are organised in themed collections including a few eccentric ones like alien, destroy, and bard code. They even have a niche category that is entirely dedicated to fonts made out of famous logos.
The way DaFont works is by accepting submissions of fonts from users all over the world, so while these fonts are made available free for personal use, you must check each individual font licensing terms before using them on a commercial project. After downloading a font from DaFont, check your download folder, you are likely to find the license agreement in a .txt file.
One of the best features of DaFont is the possibility to type a text to preview a sample of all available fonts at once. When combined with DaFont’s wide selection of weird fonts, this is the best site to quickly find fonts for even the most challenging projects.
How to Get Even More Free Fonts
The free fonts download websites listed above are the very best in the category, but there is no harm in have more options available, so there’s why we’ve put the list below. It pretty much includes every single free download website we ever stumbled upon.
Even though we’ve done our best to only recommend sites where you can get access to commercial use free fonts, please, be sure to always check the individual licensing terms of fonts before using it in your projects.
Or, if you have a few dollars to spare, I recommend checking Creative Market fonts, they are the best premium catalogue out there.