Fonts Archive - Paper Leaf Design | Edmonton Graphic Design, Edmonton Web Design

Archive for the ‘Fonts’ Category

6 of the Best Sites for Premium Fonts

May 9, 2011

Us designers…. we love our fonts. Free fonts are all well and good, but because the entry point is $0.00, there are a few issues that arise: mainly, quality can be substandard and overuse of the same well-designed fonts can be rampant. One solution? Buck up and pay for some beautifully made premium fonts. There are a huge number of websites out there willing to sell you fonts, but the following sites are my favorites.

FontFont

FontFont claims that they are the “world’s largest library of original, contemporary typefaces” – and it’s tough to dispute, given the volume of quality typefaces they have available for purchase. Everything is here, from clean sans-serifs to crazy display fonts.

Popular: FF DIN
New: FF Spinoza

Hoefler & Frere Jones

Responsible for some of the most beautiful typefaces around – like Gotham, which is used by absolutely everyone ever on earth, including us – H&FJ has a smaller library of families available for purchase. It’s not the quantity though; it’s the quality.

Popular: Gotham
New: Ideal Sans

Hit the jump for the whole article! Read the whole article >

10 Free New Web Fonts You Can Use Today

April 11, 2011

As we continue to progress through this relatively new era of web fonts, we see more & more choices available to us. We have a plethora of well-designed fonts to pick from for our design projects, and quite a few of them are free too. Slab serifs? Script? Humanist sans? All these and more are at our fingertips – so, with that in mind, here are ten well-designed & free new web fonts you can use today.

Cabin

This well made sans-serif typeface has 8 weights for download.

Bevan

A bold, heavy slab-serif.

Pacifico

A playful script font.

Quattrocentro Roman

A classy serif font, similar to Trajan in some regards. Read the whole article >

10 Tools for Better Web Fonts

June 7, 2010

There are a bevy of tools in the typography-savvy web designer’s toolbox these days. No longer are we tied down by the age-old web safe font list; now, we actually have choices when it comes to setting & styling live type on the web. Of course, there are still issues with those using old browsers, but their punishment is dose after dose of Times, Arial and so forth.

Allow me to run down the current choices for designers & developers when it comes to live fonts on the web. Some of these are free; some are paid; some are easier to implement than others. It’s up to you to make the choice as to which tool is best for you and your project, but I’ll share my opinions throughout. If I missed any that you use on the regular, let me know in the comments! *note: each title and image links to the service’s website.

@font-face

free

This CSS3 selector is probably the most widely-used tool for font-embedding today. It’s super easy to implement, and you can use any open-source font whose license allows for font-embedding.

Essentially, you upload the font to your server and link to it within your CSS file. For what it’s worth, I almost exclusively use FontSquirrel’s @font-face tools, which include kits and generators. If you’re overwhelmed by the amount of choice when it comes to @font-face fonts, check out the 10 Best @font-face Fonts.

Google Font API

free

This service from Google is even easier than @font-face to implement, although their list of available fonts isn’t so big (yet). It’s a similar idea to @font-face, but you don’t have to host the font on your server. You just throw in one line of code in your HTML and define the font in your CSS. That’s it.

Hit the jump for more ways to better your web typography! Read the whole article >

10 Best @font-face Fonts

February 5, 2010

As soon as I learned about the @font-face CSS declaration, my life as a designer changed permanently. A whole world of possibilities are opened up by this feature – no more relying on Arial, Verdana, Georgia and all the other “web safe” fonts. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with those fonts, but after seeing them day after day on the web, I know I long for a bit of variety.

However, just because a font is @font-face compatible doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for the purpose you want to use it. The obvious examples are there – don’t use display fonts as your body text, for example – but some fonts just aren’t great for the web (or great at all… or good… or passable).

So I’ve come to save the day with my opinions. Here’s the 10 Best @font-face Fonts, broken into Display (aka Heading 1, Heading 2 etc) and Body listings.

DISPLAY

Use these guys for your H1, H2 etc tags – but if you set your body text in them, I’ll come right through the internet and beat you up.

Museo & Museo Slab

The Museo family has exploded in popularity, and with good reason – it’s a well-designed typeface all around, unique & usable with character. Museo & Museo Slab are great options for headings on your site using the @font-face declaration.

Hit the jump for the rest of the 10 Best @font-face Fonts! Read the whole article >

10 Awesome Free Hand-Drawn Fonts

December 14, 2009

Every once in a while, a design calls for a somewhat sketchy, hand-drawn font. Perhaps it’s a gig poster; perhaps it’s for an !!ENERGY DRINK!! company; perhaps it’s something completely different. As a designer, chances are you usually have a ton of work on your plate and can’t always hand-style lettering unique to each project. That’s where hand-drawn fonts come in.

Some are sketchy; some are based off of well-known fonts; all are great. Check out this list of 10 Awesome Free Hand-Drawn Fonts! If you like it, don’t forget to check out our list of the 10 Free & Amazing Display Fonts too.