How many of you buy fonts? *Commercial Use/Designing Question Mostly

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How many of you buy fonts? *Commercial Use/Designing Question Mostly

Curious. As I dabble more and more into re-entering the professional side of designing, I have to be more careful and thoughtful about what fonts I am using in my designs. I have downloaded some blog train submissions here at PS and have found some fonts used in some of the layered templates to be fonts that once Google searched, cost money. So just curious how many of you buy fonts and if you do not buy fonts, how do you find commercial use fonts for free?

I will occasionally buy the font bundle from Design Cuts when they have one on offer. You get a lot of fonts for a good price.

I buy fonts at places like Creative Fabrica, Creative Market, and Fontbundles. They also offer some commercial use fonts for free. You can also find free CU fonts at fontsquirrel.

I subscribe to Creative Fabrica and a few others like that because they often offer CU fonts for free.

Yes, I buy CU fonts, as well as downloading freebies. Here are some of my favourite sites:

Creative Fabrica [you can subscribe for fonts, graphics & crafts]

Font Squirrel [free CU fonts]

Dafont [look for "100% Free"]

FontSpace [look for "Commercial Use Friendly"]

Blue Vinyl Free Fonts [they also sell fonts, but the free ones can be used for both personal & commercial projects]

Pixel Surplus [has CU freebies as well as bundles to purchase]

Font Bundles [great value bundles, as well as some freebies]

Design Cuts [bundles, etc]

These will get you started, but Uncle Google will find you heaps more!

I haven't finished sorting out my own fonts yet, but have tossed any that [a] aren't CU, and [b] that I don't LOVE, and I still have over 4,000. [As you can see, I'm a fontaholic!]

Font Squirrel has CU only. So that is a good place to go.

I dont buy any fonts - cant afford to - I just pick up the FREE ones smiley

I am always on the lookout for new CU fonts. Most of my favorite shoppes have already been listed except maybe The Hungry JPEG. They offer weekly freebies (not just fonts), an occasional free font bundle, and $1 deals.

I second the Hungry JPEG! They usually offer a monthly (or lately less often, it seems) font bundle. If you subscribe to their emails, they'll usually send a 20% off discount code at some point during the month, so I wait for those and buy the bundles then.

For layered templates I pretty much always try to do the text parts using fonts the template user can download for free. I'm always a bit sad when I go to use someone's template only to discover I can't actually use the neat text shown in the preview, since I don't own the font and Photoshop has converted it to some boring system default font. Font Squirrel is a great resource for clean & clear free CU fonts, though as a CU4CU designer it is important to check the license for each font because some of them now have Creative Commons ShareAlike licenses, which don't really work for CU4CU designing.

I'll also say that for me, there was zero point in paying money for fonts before I had a robust font organizer. I had bought some Design Cuts and Hungry JPEG bundles, and downloaded tons of free Creative Market fonts, but I had no good way to quickly preview everything that I had to find the best font for the occasion. My partner bought Suitcase Fusion for me as a gift (it's not cheap, sadly) and it changed everything! I am way more likely to be creative with fonts now. Before I tended to stick with the same familiar few.

I've been looking for a font manager. It's really a challenge to sift through what I have. I'll check out Suitcase Fusion.

I bought a huge bundle of fonts years ago and I've been using them as they are for commercial use

I have just joined the Hungry JPEG only to find that I have to SHARE their website everytime I want to download a bundle or a freebie. I dont like pushing my interests onto my family and friends because most of them are not interested graphic design....

How do you guys share without invading their privacy and without pushing this stuff onto them?

@Robynne, I have a Twitter account with a fake name I made a long time ago to use for playing a game that had some Twitter integration. I'm not friends with any of my real-life people with that account. I use that account on the occasions Hungry JPEG asks me to "share." I believe they only do that for their free resources, which seems fair to me. You can share the paid bundles to get a discount, but like I said I just wait for the discount code that almost always comes around in email.

@Marisa, Suitcase Fusion has changed EVERYTHING. It's a bit buggy and I would say I have to quit & restart it about once every 20 or so times I have it open. It also very frustratingly won't let you update tags, styles, etc. (basically all the font organizing stuff) if you are offline, and sometimes it doesn't recognize when I'm online. I also love to go to conferences and such and organize my fonts while I'm listening to presentations, but often I don't have internet access in those situations so it's pretty annoying to me that I can't do that with Suitcase. These are minor issues, though, compared to how useful it has been to me.

Being able to easily preview the text I want in every font is incredible. If I want a phrase in hand-written script for a journal card, I put the phrase into the QuickType preview, go to my Hand Script set, and just scroll until I find the one I want. It has also saved some space on my computer (no idea if it's a lot or a little) to keep my fonts uninstalled - I temporarily install the ones I choose and they automatically appear in PS and AI, and I keep some of my workhorse fonts permanently installed. Photoshop loads faster, too, without needing to load my thousands of fonts.

It also has separate sections for "tags" and "styles," so I made tags for each type of license (CU that allows making Alphas, CU that doesn't allow alphas but is ok for other scrapbook design, CU that forbids scrapbook design (ugh, hate those), and PU only) so I can quickly filter by license, which is one of the biggest time-savers for me.

I didn't expect to go on at such length about Suitcase! It's just made such a big difference, I wouldn't know what to do without it, now. Let me know if you have any questions!

Thanks Violet smiley

I definitely have too many fonts installed, it slows stuff down, that could be a real help!

Robynne, I also was disturbed to have to share for the downloads, although I understand the reasoning behind the request. There are a few other sites that also ask for the share, so I found a way around it. I share to my facebook, but share it to "only me." Once the download is complete, I go to my facebook and delete the entry. If you do this, you have to be sure and change the setting back to "public/friends/etc" when you next post.

Thanks Madge - THAT I can do!! smiley

Like Marisa... I, too, have purchased bundles from Design Cuts & they often have free fonts that can be used for Commercial purposes.

If you've not previously heard of them, then, do check them out...great stuff at great prices (and more than fonts are available)!

I usually find free fonts that I can use from various sites.

I, too, find free CU fonts for my collection. If I'm going to make something editable (a layout, PDFs for my sister to use in her classroom, etc.), then I make sure to use a font that is free for the user to download if it isn't embeddable in the project.

I also have way too many fonts, so I found NexusFont as a font manager. It's free to use, and while it also is occasionally a bit buggy/laggy, it works fine for what I need and thanks to being able to tag fonts and make collections, I don't have to sift through some 300+ fonts on my system to find the ones that work for a given project.

I buy fonts because I use a lot for Bible verses in my Etsy shop. I keep my CU in a different folder so I don't get them confused.

I do a mixture of both- free CU fonts and paid CU fonts.

Lot's of free fonts available which are great