Excellent sites for free Windows and Mac fonts

Perhaps you too have dreams of becoming a graphic designer, like me. May be you just need to get your hands on some fonts that'll help you finish up the project you're working on. Sounds easy enough. But the truth is that although fonts are taken for granted, creating fonts take a lot of time. Generally, they also cost a whole lot of money.
Often, creating fonts is a specialized field and to get your hands on certain types of fonts can mean a lot of money. Plus, if you use a font illegally (without their permission) in your work, and the original designer finds out, you'll probably find yourself in a lawsuit pretty soon.

But there are a couple of sites out there that do allow people to download fonts for free, without having to purchase them. The terms are different for each site, but most likely you wont be able to include them in any commercial work. Nevertheless, you can still download them and play around as you wish.

Of course, if you don’t know how to install or remove these new fonts then you can refer to the ‘installing and removing fonts on windows’ article for windows, and 'installing and removing fonts on Mac’ article for Macs.

Excellent sites for Windows and Mac fonts

1. Smashing Magazine – Smashing magazine has a huge collection of links to websites that have some excellent free fonts. Although they do occasionally post about ‘expensive and professional’ fonts for professional graphic designers, the amount of free fonts on their website far surpasses the amount of article about paid fonts.

2. Urban Fonts – Urban fonts is also a great website to get all sorts of free fonts. Although, I must mention here that these fonts are not always the best fonts to use in your designs because I find that they are not designed ‘perfectly’ like most professional fonts out there. Still, its a great website, and definitely a one worth checking out for more fonts.

3. Font Space – Just like Urban fonts, font space also has a lot of great fonts, especially a long list of display fonts that you can use in your projects. According to their website they have 9487 free fonts at the moment.

4. Dafont.com – Dafont also has a great variety of fonts for both the windows and mac platforms. Although their website does look a little dated, and their search feature isn’t as good as I’d like it to be.

Although there are more resources out there, these are by far the only ones I use. In my opinion typography is all about using type effectively, and as long as you have the basic repertoire of sans serif, serif and a few display fonts here and there, you’re work will be stunning every time.