New Font: BigBlok
A great many years ago when working in game publishing I had a real fascination with doing titles in a strong, super-bold font called Bolt Bold. The truth is I rather overused it. In doing some research I find it on more than a dozen different game books I wrote in the early 80s, all quite collectable and out of print today.
Free Fonts for the Web
After a while using the web you get tired of seeing everything in the same old fonts. Since fonts are what we do here at the Scriptorium it seemed like our responsibility to do something to make the web look a bit more interesting. We’re putting out a series of free web fonts which we hope will bring your web pages and your browsing to life.
Our first three Web Fonts have been specifically designed for readable text. Unlike other fonts designed for screen display, ours are made not only with an eye towards legibility, but also with a desire to provide something a bit more stylish and eye-pleasing than some of the very utilitarian fonts you may have encountered.
Sirona is the best example of the special style we want to bring to web fonts. It is based on Lombardic calligraphy, but with modifications which make it extraordinarily readable on screen even at small sizes. Sirona is an excellent replacement for Times or New York or any other serif font set by your browser, but we particularly recommend it for web designers as a titling or captioning font.
As an alternative for those who value ease of reading over style and artistry, we offer Divona which has many of the characteristics of the most readable sans serif fonts, with the addition of moderate serifs which help the eye travel more easily when reading large areas of text. This makes it one of the most readable fonts you’ll ever encounter. Use it where your browser suggests Times, New York, Arial or Helvetica.
For tables you’ve got to have a non-proportional font, so we’ve developed one which is very special. It is a hybrid font. Essentially it is a sans serif font, but has some serifs added in appropriate places on certain characters to address some of the spacing problems common in sans serif fonts and increase readability. We think the result is pretty remarkable. Use it in places where your browser suggests Monaco or Courier.
These fonts are licensed to you for free for your personal use. Download them. Install them on your computer, and you can redistribute them if you include a link to our site.
Define them in your HTML code (FONT FACE=”Sirona,Divona,Onuava”) to give your site a unique look. All we ask is that you distribute them with a link to this page. Just copy this link button and use it on your page. The fonts are also now available in .swf format for embedding in your site so that users don’t have to download them. Look for a forthcoming article on how to do this.
Download Fonts for Windows and MacOS in a Zip archive. For the Flash .swf fonts download here.
We have other resources which you may find useful. You can find our web design packages of fonts and art at WEB DESIGN. We also have a special offer for webmasters at WEBMASTERS.
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2 Responses to “Free Fonts for the Web”
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How do you feel about people using @font-face in CSS to have browsers download the fonts automatically?
And, have you seen openfontlibrary.org?
Liam
Liam, if it works I’m all for it. The automatic download feature is exactly the kind of thing which these fonts were developed for.
I haven’t checked out openfontlibrary.org yet, but I will.
I still think that something like .swf format fonts is the most practical solution. We may actually start selling inexpensive bundles of fonts in that format after we do a bit more viability testing.
Dave