In this edition of the ongoing series on must-have cool fonts, I’ll be sharing my favorite fancy fonts and display fonts.
This includes those that are perfect for typographic treatments, that don’t fit into normal categories, or those that deserve a little extra attention because of all the sweet bells and whistles that are packed in.
I’ve included a ransom note font, cool free fonts, western fonts, heavy fonts, humanist fonts, and more from some of the coolest typographers and font foundries.
Fancy Fonts and Display Fonts
Fancy fonts and display fonts are ones that you would use primarily for header images, headlines, and typography illustrations. A lot of them have alternate characters, ligatures, and all sorts of extras that really make a difference when it comes to great fonts and typographic treatments.
Megalopolis Font by SMeltery has lots of extra ligatures and alternate characters. I love this font!
Ransom Note Font by Divide by Zero
Ayosmonika by Germán Ventriglia. Pardon me if this is a huge generalization, but I love sites by non-US designers—they’re typically way more creative and experimental, as you can see with Ventriglia’s site. There’s a whole section of free wallpaper too, so take a look!
Drunken Hour by Jakob Fischer. His colorful site is definitely worth checking out; he’s got a ton of gorgeous free fonts and commercial fonts for your enjoyment.
Treasury Pro by Canada Type
Hodgepodge by Outside the Line
LD Garbo by Lettering Delights
Exotica by West Wind Fonts
Betabet by Elemeno
GrutchShaded by Steeve Gruson
Zebrawood from Adobe
ITC Eastwood by ITC
Macabra Font by Fabrika de Typos. Like many fonts, this one takes a bit of kerning to get the letter spacing looking right, so make sure to take a second look before finalizing designs with this font.
Mesquite™ Std from Adobe
Nasty Font by Misprinted Type. I <3 Eduardo Recife. He's only one of the coolest designers ever, and his work has gained some widespread acclaim. He's done illustrated magazine covers for Time and the New York Times Magazine, among others. His illustrations have a vintage, delicate, dirty-grunge, collage feel, almost like a turn-of-the-century decoupage, but cooler. His fonts also have Recife’s signature style.
Pinewood by Dieter Steffmann, an incredible German typographer who’s put out an arsenal of fonts.
Earthwerk Font. Another great one from Jakob Fischer aka PizzaDude. It’s got a lot of stuff packed in for customization—alternate letters, ligatures, upper and lowercase characters, and more.
Linotype Barock™ by Jean-Jacques Tachdjian is based on the baroque Antigua font and is great for large-scale headlines.
Linotype BioPlasm™ by Mauro Carichini. Perfect for medical and technical industry work.
NeoRetroDraw by Font Boutique. One of my favorite handdrawn fonts.
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Comments
10.16.09
… I also find myself torn between the coffee shop and my dual monitor setup
11.04.09
May I suggest ABR Viewer as an alternative to loading and trying each brush in Photoshop? It’s free, and I use it regularly. You may find this a great time-saving alternative!
http://abrviewer.sourceforge.net/
Hope it helps!
11.04.09
Thanks for the referral, Cyndi! I’ll have to spend some time tonight trying it out.
02.11.10
I love you to pieces man!!
10.14.10
I wished and wished for a Mac, then was given one at work.
So I moved all my files over.
I HATE it. I’m a designer. I have about 50 folders for 50 different projects. I name the banner psd “banner.psd” for all of them. Try and search for them all, yeah the Mac finds them but then you have to do “get info” for each one (or change some such setting and still click on each to see where the dang thing is located. On windows. I glanced at the path to the folder and voila. Yeah changing permissions on Vista is a headache but it’s far better than the constant problems I have on the Mac. Photoshop is twitchy at best, the thing crashes, although my Roku, PS3, Wii, personal laptop all do fine with my wirless, the mac drops it all the time. I use multiple monitors. Oh my god what idiot thought of leaving the application menu on one screen when the application is on another? You can only choose one little sprout because Steve Jobs knows better than you how you should work.
can’t wait to ditch it.
sorry tirade over.
ps tons of free windows applications out there.
11.26.10
Um… how about not naming all of your files the same name? Sounds more like an organizational issue than an operating system issue, either way.
I might recommend using an identifier and THEN _banner.psd? I assume it’d be difficult to find photos as well if every picture on a drive had its own folder and was named “photo.jpg”.
Examples:
Projectname_size_banner.psd
Clientname_size_banner.psd
etc…
04.17.11
Ok, so… I’m a total newbie to photoshop. I have CS5 and a brickton of brushes. I have tried renaming them, but they do NOT show up in the list like I want them to. I’ve played around with it for like a half hour. Can anyone please help?