On the Floor

We all know where to find free fonts on the web these days, but it's actually quite difficult to find good quality fonts. While sites like www.dafont.com, www.fontriver.com and www.1001freefonts.com may actually end up offering you that unique or eccentric font you're looking for, as a self-professed type-nerd, I find that more than 95% of the fonts offered on these free font sites are quite terrible. And the time it takes to scrounge through all the rubbish hardly makes it worth the time. What's more, even if you do find a half-decent font, more often than not they're only licensed to be used for personal work.

Enter Font Squirrel. Developed and curated by fellow type-nerds, this fairly new site aims to offer only high-quality (read: well-designed, by real type foundries and type designers) fonts for design professionals. From the Font Squirrel site: "Font Squirrel is your best resource for FREE hand-picked, high-quality, commercial-use fonts. Even if that means we send you somewhere else to get them."

While the site is still in it's infancy, already there are over 240 fonts. That may not seem like much compared to the 1,000+ fonts available on other free font websites, but remember these are high-quality fonts. I've been browsing through the many categories on offer for a couple weeks now, and overall I'm very impressed with what I see. Whereas the percentage of decent fonts on most of the other free font sites has been less than 5%, I'd say that percentage is higher than 80% on Font Squirrel. It's that good.

Icing on the cake? Yes, there's that too. If you design for the web, you most certainly know what a giant pain-in-the-arse it can be to embed non-web fonts into your pages. There are many hacks, but no real solutions. With most of the fonts available on Font Squirrel, you also get an @font-face kit which includes 4 font formats, CSS and HTML code.

@font-face is a simply a CSS rule that allows web designers and developers to reference fonts not installed on end user machines without finicky flash replacement or glitchy javascript. Read more about this cheery new tech here.

Check out Font Squirrel and be impressed. Very impressed.