Cool Fonts - Where to Download & How to Install

There are two types of fonts in the world: free ones and ones you have to pay for.

And while on one hand you get what you pay for (quality in ways you can't understand until you need a full font set), on the other hand sometimes the best things in life really are free.

So is the case with fonts. Quality can come at a price, and there are some advantages with buying a font but there are plenty of free ones that will do the job. Just be sure to take a few moments to read the readme.txt file that usually comes zipped up with the font.

Whether you need it to create web graphics to enhance a site, decorate a flyer to print out and display or design a logo, there are plenty of fantastic fonts that will help convey and communicate your message.

We'll be having a look at five of the most popular and best font sites on the Internet...

There's not many sites on the world wide web that allow you to choose your own color scheme for the entire site, but Da Font is one of them (check out the top right hand link "Site Color").

The site is well ordered and layed out. The front page greets you with the three most recent additions. But clicking on New Fonts is the first thing I like to do to see.

Top 100 gives a quick taste of what's the most popular.

"Font Authors" allows you to view by Author. A handy feature if you find yourself drawn to the work of any particular author. As they tend to have a style all their own, and you kind find similar font styles in theme or quality.

There is a Custom Preview with each font, handy for taking the font for a test drive.

They have their categories under the following groups: Fancy, Foreign, Techno, Bitmap, Gothic, Basic Script, Dingbats and Holiday Themes

And the site is also available in French.

www.dafont.com

With over 8,000 freeware fonts you'll be forgiven for being a little apprehensive. But Urban Fonts makes it easier by featuring a Search tool (top right hand side of the page) and also sharing results of what the Top Searches are. The bigger the tag the more people have been hitting it.

The fonts are displayed in their own names, but if you mouse over you get to see the font applied to the entire alphabet in both lowercase and uppercase.

By clicking on your favored font you get taken to its own page where you are treated with the ability to do a Custom Preview, so type in your name or word there and see it automatically render the word with the font from 8 point all the way up to 160 point. You can also select a custom color for the font, and also for the background.

The collection is broken down into these categories: 3D, Adventure, Arabic, Asian, Beveled, Brush, Calligraphy, Celtic, Chinese, Comic, Computer, Curly, Decorative, Dirty, Distorted, Dotted, Embossed, Famous, Fire, Foreign, Funky, Futuristic, Gothic, Graffiti, Greek, Handwritten, Headline, Holidays, Japanese, Modern, Monospaced, Old English, Old Fashioned, Outline, Pixel/Bitmap, Retro, Rounded, Russian, Sans-serif, Scary, Serif, Sophisticated, Square, Stencil, Typewriter and Western.

www.urbanfonts.com

1001 Free Fonts is an independent free fonts distributor which started in Ireland. They first opened their doors in late 1998 and receive more than 40,000 visitors daily. They proudly boast that over one billion fonts have been downloaded since 1998.

The site itself lacks the spiffy design sense of the others, and less bells and whistles when previewing the sites, but it ranks highly with a vast selection of quality fonts from the following categories:

3D Fonts, Animal Fonts, Arabic Fonts, Army/Stencil Fonts, Asian Fonts, Bitmap/Pixel Fonts, Brush Fonts, Calligraphy Fonts, Celtic Fonts, Christmas Fonts, Comic Fonts, Computer Fonts, Curly Fonts, Decorative Fonts, Distorted Fonts, Dotted Fonts, Famous Fonts, Fire Fonts, Gothic Fonts, Graffiti Fonts, Greek/Roman Fonts, Handwriting Fonts, Headline Fonts, Horror Fonts, Ice/Snow Fonts, Italic Fonts, LCD Fonts, Medieval Fonts, Mexican Fonts, Modern Fonts, Old English Fonts, Old School Fonts, Outline Fonts, Retro Fonts, Rock/Stone Fonts, Rounded Fonts, Russian Fonts, Sci Fi Fonts, Typewriter Fonts and Western Fonts.

www.1001freefonts.com

A young Ray Larabie became interested in fonts in the early 70’s when his grandmother gave him sheets of Letraset. He became so familiar with typefaces that by the age of 17 he could identify hundreds of fonts by name.

www.larabiefonts.com

The design of the site isn't too busy, but it's easy to get lost from doing what you're there to do, which is download free fonts.

Still though, it's a good site to have bookmarked if you're looking for something special or need to find something new and fresh.

www.fontstock.net

Unzip the files you have downloaded, then :Windows Vista : Right-click on the font files (.ttf, .otf, .fon) > Install

Windows XP : Put the font files (.ttf, .otf, .fon) into C:\Windows\Fonts

To install a font under Linux, copy the font files (.ttf or .otf) to fonts:/// in the File manager.

It's a good idea not to install too many fonts. Windows is supposed to be able to manage about 1000 fonts. But avoid to install too many fonts at one time because that slows down the system.

Every time Adobe Photoshop boots up, or you're using a word processor, the program needs to check how many fonts you have available. And the more you've got, the longer it takes.

This is because they have to load to memory all installed fonts to be able to run. So it is better to put fonts you use regularly in the Fonts folder. Keep a folder of all your favorite fonts. Install/uninstall them as needed. Categorize them for quicker access.

Keep a back-up of your favorite fonts on a CD, or a DVD if you're a bit of a horder (I keep mine on an external hard disk drive). That way when you upgrade to a new computer or if you need to use another one you have the entire collection ready to go.

You can view a font to show what it looks like just by double-clicking on it, which is handy, though it doesn't have the full impact of seeing the text you want used being formatted with the font. But when it's open like that you can can use them even though its not installed. Just open up your wordprocessor (such as Microsoft Word) or paint program (such as Adobe Photoshop) and those fonts which are opened yet not installed will be available in your font list. But you need to open the program after you've double-clicked the font file.

If you're making a webpage with a HTML editor or using a site similar to HubPages that allows the user to use basic HTML to format the fonts you should be mindful that not all the fonts at your disposal are viewable on the world wide web.

The reason being is that while you can see them on your computer, others may not have the benefit of having the same font installed on their system.

There is a standard set of fonts common to all versions of Windows and Mac which is sometimes referred to as "browser safe fonts".

These will work 99% of the time:

• Arial
• Courier New
• Times New Roman
• Verdana
• Trebuchet MS
• Lucida Sans