Free Fonts

Some of our Web Templates may require the use of fonts that you dont currently have on your computer! We have included a list of fonts that may be required when editing some of the web templates in Photoshop.

Arrow Font
Butter Belly
Chauncer
Cold Bringer
Cuomo Type
Fiorne
Frou Frou
Grunge
Gun Play
One Way Font
Pio
Roman Acid
Rothwell
ROTOcap
ROTOxb
Silkscreen
Single Stroke
Skater Dudes
Smudger LET
Tech Nine
Tranti Solid
Vibrocentric
XBAN Drough

- More fonts coming soon!

What is a Font?

A Specimen of typeset fonts and languages, by William Caslon, letter founder; from the 1728 Cyclopaedia.In typography, a typeface consists of a co-ordinated set of grapheme (i.e., character) designs. A typeface usually comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks. Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and Courier are three examples of typefaces. A typeface may also include or consist of ideograms and symbols (e.g., mathematical or map-making glyphs). The art of designing typefaces, called type design, is the occupation of a type designer.

In metal type, the word font denoted a complete typeface in a particular size (usually measured in points), one weight (e.g., light, book, bold, black), and one orientation or angle (e.g. roman, italic, oblique). As regards digital type, the font is the computer file that stores the vector paths, before they are brought into being on a screen or a page. Digital fonts do contain unlimited (or application-limited) sizes. Some applications can create additional weights or orientations of a font automatically, but these are not considered typographically correct as human intervention is required to make these adjustments well.

A font family is a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc. For examples, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are each fonts. Most font families contain a handful of fonts, though some (e.g. Zapf Dingbats) may contain only one, and others (e.g. Helvetica) may contain dozens of fonts.

History
A font, from Middle French fonte, meaning "(something that has been) melt(ed) [akin to Fondue]" and referring to letters of a typeface produced by casting molten metal at a type foundry, consists of a set of glyphs (images) representing the characters from a particular character set in a particular typeface. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes (governing the actual height of the characters), and in sorts (governing the quantities of each letter provided). The design of a given character in a font took into account all these factors. In addition, as the spectrum of available designs and requirements of publishers has broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (how dark the text appears—bold or light, for example) and additional specific conditions (most commonly "regular" as opposed to " italic" and/or "condensed") have led to "typeface families", collections of closely-related typeface designs that may include hundreds of styles.

English-speaking printers have used the term fount for centuries to refer to the multipart device used (in its day) to assemble and print in a particular size and typeface design. Type foundries cast virtually all fonts in various lead alloys from the 1450s until the middle of the 20th century, though wood served to make a few large fonts (wood type), especially in the United States of America. In the 1890s mechanized typesetting emerged and began casting fonts on-the-fly in the form of lines of type of the size and length needed. This became known as "hot metal" type, and it remained profitable and widespread until its demise in the 1970s. The first machine of this type was the Linotype invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler.

During a relatively brief transitional period (circa 1950s – 1990s), photographic technology, known as "phototypesetting", produced fonts which came on rolls or discs of film. Photographic typesetting allowed for optical scaling, which meant that designers could produce multiple sizes from a single font (although physical constraints on the reproduction system used still required design-changes at different sizes — for example, ink traps and spikes to allow for spread of ink). Manually-operated phototypographic composition systems (using fonts made on rolls of film) allowed fine kerning between letters without great physical effort for the first time and spawned a large type-design industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

The mid-1970s saw all of the major typeface technologies and all their fonts in use: from the original letterpress process of Gutenberg to mechanical metal typesetters, phototypositors, computer-controlled phototypesetters, and the earliest digital typesetters, (hulking machines with tiny processors and CRT outputs). From the mid-1980s, as digital typography has relentlessly grown, users have almost universally adopted the American spelling font, which nowadays nearly always means a computer file containing scalable, outline letterforms ("digital fonts"), usually in one of several common formats. Designers of some fonts, such as Microsoft's Verdana, intend their product primarily for use on computer screens.

Digital fonts may encode the image of each character either as a bitmap, in a bitmap font, (seldom used since 1995) or by a higher-level description in terms of lines and curves enclosing a space (an outline font, also called a "vector font"). An outline "rasterizer" then fills the enclosed space of an outline font, deciding which pixels to represent as "black" and which as "white". The rasterization proceeds in straightforward fashion at higher resolutions (as for example in laser printers and in high-end publishing systems) but for screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legibility and illegibility, digital fonts need hints included to make readable bitmaps at small sizes. Digital fonts today also contain data representing the "typography" used to compose them, including kerning pairs, component-creation data for accented characters, glyph-substitution rules for Arabic typography, and for connecting script faces and for simple everyday ligatures like "fl". (Common description languages that format digital type include METAFONT, PostScript, TrueType and OpenType. Enablers of these formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple Computer operating systems, Adobe Systems products and those of several other companies.)