How To: Get & Install Fonts

Many websites sell and offer free fonts. A few free font websites include Font Squirrel and DaFont. You can buy fonts on sites like Creative Market and Font Shop.

Fonts typically range between $15-40 each. If you pay for a font at any amount, you can bet it'll be of good quality. At the end of the day, it's a product, and designers can charge whatever they see fit for the quality they provide.

Some sites will offer demo fonts. These can be installed and used, but will not include even common glyphs such as commas or slashes. Sometimes, they will not allow you to save or print your document. To get complete access to it, you'll have to buy the original version.

Every site that offers fonts will provide a preview of it. With this, you can type your own phrases to see what it will look like. This is especially important when looking at free fonts. Anyone can make a font and upload it; so you want to make sure it looks nice in real applications.

Most free fonts will just be downloadable by themselves. Though, when you purchase fonts, they can include more fonts within that same family; such as italic or bold versions. Some can even come with other fonts that pair well together to encourage you to purchase it.

When you get a free font, the licensing will always allow you to use it for personal or educational use. Most times this does not cover commercial use, such as using it in your logo, or on something you will sell. It should tell you on the website or in a document when you download it, what the license covers. When you buy a font, it will give you the option to choose the license type. It is illegal to use it without certain permissions.

When you're ready to download the font, it may give you the option between an OTF or TTF file. OTF are capable of holding more glyphs and variations, but it really doesn't matter what you choose.

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Installing Fonts

Find it in your downloads folder, unzip it, and open the folder. Double click the font file and it will open in Fontbook (Mac) or Fonts (PC), then click Install.