Frankly Franklin - The design and technology blog of Tim Ngwena

Wordle created from mentioned pages

Smashingmagazine.com A collection of over 4o free professional fonts collated by the team at Smashingmagazine. Although It’s from 2007, this is a great source of inspiration to start off your font wanderings. Also look out for their related post on fonts.

Noupe.com Another collection of fonts this time focusing on use in web design and graphic design rather than a direct focus on print design. 

Fontcubes.com With nearly 8000 fonts and 4,540,129 downloads, Fontcubes top 20 fonts are a great pick from their collection. There’s also a preview tool built into the site to save the hassle of downloading and installing or running it through your font software.

Misprintedtype.com The site’s difficult to get your head round, especially seeing as the menu changes on refresh, but navigate your way to the fonts page. You’ll find a freeware section featuring some grunge themed fonts as well as your stencil fonts. 

Instantshift.com 22 fonts up for grabs here. Again all professional and this site draws a balanced comparison by using the same technique to generate the previews, a criticism of some of the posts above. 

Font Banks

These don’t need an explanation. Quite simply, six sites to visit if your still not satisfied with the list above.  They all feature previews, are easy to use and most importantly have 1000s of fonts. Be sure to search by category or keywords or you could be on them forever.

• dafont.com/
• deviantart.com/resources/fonts
• 1001freefonts.com/
• fawnt.com/
• urbanfonts.com/
• fontcubes.com/ 

Make sure you check out the relates posts and comments in these sites as you’ll find other resources that have been forgotten or more font banks and resources for free use. This collection is by no means exhaustive but a great start and hopefully a time saver.