Hun­dreds of free fonts have ar­rived in re­cent years. Not just “free” as in “al­ready in­stalled on your com­puter” (aka sys­tem fonts). But rather, re­leased un­der an open li­cense, most of­ten the OFL, which per­mits you to do al­most any­thing you want with them. Most im­por­tantly, you can re­dis­trib­ute copies for free.

At times I’ve been la­beled a free-font cur­mud­geon. My beef with free fonts is not that they’re use­less. On the con­trary, fonts with­out pro­pri­etary li­cens­ing re­stric­tions fill a need, most of all as a com­ple­ment to open-source soft­ware. For in­stance, I couldn’t have re­designed the doc­u­men­ta­tion for Racket, an open-source pro­gram­ming lan­guage, with­out free fonts, be­cause we had to ship them with the software.

In­stead, my com­plaint about free fonts has cen­tered on a sim­pler is­sue: in terms of de­sign and crafts­man­ship, most free fonts are garbage. Sure, that’s true of many pro­fes­sional fonts too. But early on, cer­tain free-font pro­po­nents pushed the ar­gu­ment that some­how, quan­tity mat­tered more than quality.

For­tu­nately, not every­one felt the same way. Across my years rag­ing against this par­tic­u­lar ma­chine, or­ga­ni­za­tions that ap­pre­ci­ate the value of good de­sign—and had money to spend—funded the de­vel­op­ment of some free fonts that are ac­tu­ally very good:

• Mozilla hired Erik Spiek­er­mann (see fore­word) and Ralph Car­rois to make Fira Sans and Fira Mono, de­signs built upon the adaman­tium en­doskele­ton of his long­time best­seller Meta.

• Adobe re­leased a very nice mono­spaced font called Source Code Pro, de­signed by Paul Hunt; and the com­pan­ion Source Serif Pro, de­signed by Frank Grießhammer.

• The Smith­son­ian com­mis­sioned Chester Jenk­ins to cre­ate the ex­cel­lent Cooper He­witt sans serif family.

• Most re­cently, IBM’s Mike Ab­bink worked with Paul van der Laan to make IBM Plex, an im­mense fam­ily cov­er­ing sans, serif, and mono.

• Since I launched Prac­ti­cal Ty­pog­ra­phy, I’ve been push­ing Char­ter, a 1987 Matthew Carter de­sign that holds up beau­ti­fully on to­day’s screens.

The fonts above are won­der­ful! And won­der­fully free! Whether my cur­mud­geonisms have had an im­pact, I can’t say. But to­day, if your project re­quires free fonts, you have plenty of good op­tions. If you refuse, you have no one to blame but yourself.

As for the gazil­lions of other free fonts—if you’ve got the pa­tience to pan for gold in a river of crap, knock your­self out. But un­less your time has no value, you’ll find it more ef­fi­cient just to buy a nice pro­fes­sional font.