There are many resources on the internet to find cool fonts for personal or commercial use. I’d like to share some of my favorite graffiti fonts and free font sites–I peruse them at least two or three times a week. But before using the fonts, make sure you check the licensing agreements, as the author will typically specify if the font is free, free for personal use, or free for personal and commercial use.
Sources for Free Fonts
Without a doubt, FontSquirrel is my favorite site for free fonts. Font Squirrel is a great resource for designers because every font available for download has a commercial license attached. With a commercial license, you don’t run the risk of getting into any trouble about copyrights. There are a sizable number of fonts on the site already, and the number keeps growing. The fonts are high quality, too, so you’re not getting a lot of trash.
Of the larger sites, UrbanFonts and DaFont are the two I go to most. They’re not skeezy (no pop ups or annoying banners) and you can find your way around easily. I prefer DaFont because it allows authors to specify their usage guidelines and it posts the type of use in a visible location next to the font. UrbanFonts doesn’t do this.
Graffiti fonts
For this post I’m going to focus on graffiti fonts, and I’ll get into other font types in upcoming posts. Graffiti fonts are exactly like they sound–hand drawn typefaces that are inspired by the graffiti art we see in most urban areas. Application of the fonts vary, but they are especially good for grunge designs. Anything related to hip-hop, skateboarding, snowboarding, some movies, and urban imagery are great opportunities to use graffiti fonts. Here are some of my favorites:
Graffiti Font Creator
If you don’t want to go through the trouble of hand coloring your graffiti fonts, try this Graffiti Creator. It’s a Flash app that allows you to choose a font and then fill in the letters with different colors and effects to create realistic computer generated graffiti art. If you have some time to spare, check it out! They have a great gallery of graffiti images as well.
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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?