Surely, fonts are very essential to designers.But for those who do not live on design. we also need various fonts just to make things better. For example, when we are making a greeting card, we may need some some fonts to make texts more elegant; when we are considering a text tattoo, we probably need some fonts like old English style to make our tattoo more cool. Trust me, no one would like to receive a greeting card or tattoo just to find they are written in Times New Roman or Aria.
Luckily, there are a lot of free fonts available for you to download and use. Below are 5 font sites that allows you to browse and download free fonts. It should be noted that almost all fonts on those sites can be freely used for personal purposes. If you are going to use them commercially, you should check out if it is allowed.
1 Dafont
Dafont is probably the best known free font website. It allows you to navigate fonts by various themes like fancy fonts, foreign look fonts, gothic fonts, script fonts, holiday fonts etc. You can also browse the font by licenses like public domain, donationware, free, free for personal use etc. Before downloading a font, you can type in a few sample texts to preview texts first and then decide if you really want to download it. The font license is indicated above the download link.
2 Fontspace
Fontspace is another site that hosting free fonts. Like dafont, you can browse fonts by various categories and you can preview texts under various fonts first. You also have filtering options to browse fonts that allow commercial use or browse fonts that are adult themed. Each font is rated by its users, which is good for you to quickly find quality fonts and skip those crappy fonts.
3 SearchFreeFonts
SearchFreeFonts claims to be one of the largest free fonts selections hosting 13000 free fonts as well as 91000 commercial fonts. You can not preview custom texts for each font and the license indication is also absent. But there are a few font categories that is worthy of checking out.
4 UrbanFonts
Urbanfonts covers a wide range of fonts, where you can browse free fonts, free dingbats, commercial fonts etc with many subcategories. They also features top 100 fonts, new fonts, their favorite fonts. You can preview fonts but there is no license indication on each font and you can not filter fonts by licenses.
5 AbstractFonts
On Abstractfonts, you can browse fonts by latest fonts, by categories, by designers, by languages etc through 12000 free fonts. There is also a customizable string preview. For each font, you can easily view its details such as license info, character map, user comments, similar fonts etc. Another unique feature of abstractfonts is that you can look for fonts that share two features. For example, you can choose to show fonts that are in both 3D and handwriting style, which you can not expect on other sites.