Customer Reviews

Freefonts!: Designer Fonts Online

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Given all the previous criticism below, I would have never bought the book. Luckily for me, I saw it at a retail outlet first before seeing it here.

I don't know what other people were expecting, but the book does exactly what it says, help find free fonts online. THIS IS THE INTERNET and information changes all the time! That being said, I bought the book 1 1/2 years after it first came out but was still able to find most of the sites and fonts. My only disappointment is that the fonts by Rodney Fehsenfeld are gone.

Who cares if the book lists the most popular sites out there, just do a Google search instead. At the top will be My Fonts, 1001 Fonts and other also-rans with thousands of hideous fonts that hopefully never see the light of day or page. Sure, it takes time to navigate different sites, but the fonts are FREE.
The designers wouldn't have put their fonts in the book without getting something in return---us looking at their sites.

One of the best things about the book is that it shows how a font looks on paper and composed with some sort of graphic. I don't have to squint at a fuzzy onscreen shot that looks okay only to find out later the font looks horrible printed. All in all, I found this book useful and was really glad to find it because I can't afford to just buy all the fonts I want and didn't know where to start looking for free ones either.

It's one of the few good books out there on the subject, and if people out there keep complaining, then there won't any in the future. NO, I AM NOT the Author.

Great reference and certainly worth the price. Some fonts are no longer on-line so I take away one star. (Not the fault of the book, however.)

This book is too small. It lists some free font sites but does not list some of the most popular ones, like apostrophic lab, greywolf webworks, gemfonts, blambot and a few others. Buy something else because this book is not worth it.

This book is a great reference tool. There are fonts here that are harder to find on your own. Plus the art that goes along with the font is so interesting and inspiring. There are some real font treasures here and offbeat designers that are good to know about. Links break over time, so for some of the fonts you have to do a little hunting, but it's worth it. And they are free.

This book was an impulse buy for me, after browsing through the handsome samples at a store. A collection of free, high quality fonts is a great idea, both for designers and for the foundries and type houses who use them as a means of advertising their other fonts. The editors worked to present quality over quantity (that said, previous reviewers take note: three Blambot fonts are featured here).

So why only two stars? I noticed before leaving the store that the book didn't include the fonts on CD. No big deal; surely the editors would include a way to download the collection somewhere online. Wrong!

Without a CD or at least a centralized online links list, guess what? You have to go Net-slogging every time you want to use one of these great fonts. Most can't be found at collection sites such as MyFonts and 1001Fonts. I'm no newbie, but getting these from their native sites varied from difficult to nearly impossible.

I tried every site in the book, and wound up navigating through Japanese, German and French pages with cryptic interfaces, filling out forms in Brazilian, running into out-of-date URLs, "404 not found" dead links, etc. It will definitely NOT be worth the hassle for many designers. For example, typelife.com had some of the best samples in the book. But this site currently has no links to fonts and hasn't been updated in at least three months.

Beyond that, there are problems with the "Free" part of the title. Some fonts here aren't free at all -- Borgstrand, Typing with Rudolf, and September Eleven are definitely (well, at this current moment) pay fonts. Other fonts such as Cypher 7, Freestyle, La Lienne, etc. are "not free for commercial use." In other words, you can write a letter with them or make an exit sign to your personal bathroom, but you can't use them in any commercial, paying job without buying additional rights. And there are other loopy restrictions: e.g., the Blambot fonts are only free if you're using them in independent comics.

On top of everything else, a fair number of the fonts are PC only, so Mac users have to find a way to convert them.

The fonts should have been included in Windows and Mac versions on an organized CD, even if it bumped production cost up a few bucks. Even without a CD, a simple online page by the editors with live, current links to the various fonts and/or typehouses would have made a difference. And "free" should mean FREE, or change the title or the fonts!

Which internet are these people browsing? The internet I know shows apostrophiclab.com and blambot.com to be the most potent free font sites on the web, but they're not even mentioned in this book. What about the endless free offerings of Rich Gast and Graham Meade? Not in this book. I'm getting a refund, I hope.