Typography guide
Fonts and typefaces: our favourite resources
Our favourite typeface websites
Some of these sites publish fonts; others collect work from different designers.
The League of Moveable Type
An open-source type foundry.
Open Foundry
A curated collection of open-source typefaces, with specimens and credits for their designers. Follow the links to the original projects to download the fonts.
Fontsource
Browse and download open-source fonts, with packages for self-hosting them on websites.
UNCUT.wtf
A catalogue of contemporary typefaces to browse and download.
Collletttivo
An open-source type foundry and a network of people working together on type design.
Check the licence supplied with each download before using the font in your project. It sets out the permitted uses and any conditions.
A short typography glossary
Font names can be confusing, especially when a download contains several files. In digital typography, these terms describe the design you choose and the data you use to set your text.
- Typeface
- The design of the letters, numerals, punctuation, and other glyphs that belong together. The typeface describes how they look; the file format describes how the font data is stored.
- Font family
- Related faces with a shared name and design. A family might include regular, bold, italic, or condensed faces. It can also include optical sizes: designs adapted for use at different text sizes. The same fonts may be grouped differently from one application to another.
- Font face
- One particular design within a family, such as bold italic, with its own glyphs and spacing measurements (metrics). You can get a face from a static font or by choosing an instance of a variable font.
- Font
- The digital resource that supplies glyph data, spacing measurements, and other information needed to render text. A static font supplies one face. A variable font supports multiple instances. People often use “font” and “typeface” interchangeably in conversation.
- Font file
- The file you download or install, which stores the font data. One file can give you more than one face: variable fonts support multiple instances, and collection files such as TTC or OTC can hold several font resources.
- Static font
- A font whose design parameters, such as weight and width, are fixed. It can still include alternate glyphs and ligatures. If it uses scalable outlines, you can render it at different sizes.
- Weight and style
- Weight describes how thick or dark the strokes are within a family: light and bold are weights. Style describes forms such as upright, italic, and oblique. Italic often changes the letterforms; oblique usually slopes the upright forms. A designed italic or oblique face can look different from one that software has simply slanted.
- Variable font
- An OpenType font with one or more adjustable design axes, such as weight, width, or optical size. The designer sets a minimum, default, and maximum for each axis. Named instances are particular settings within those ranges. Check which axes the font includes: a variable font may cover only some weights and may have no italic design.
- Glyph
- A shape the font uses to represent text. The letters “f” and “i” can appear together as one ligature glyph. A single character can have several alternative glyphs, or it can need more than one glyph to display.
Technical references: Adobe’s typographic terms (PDF), OpenType font files, OpenType font variations, W3C CSS Fonts, and Unicode’s characters and glyphs.