Skip to Content

WalletPop tells you how to get free stuff!
AOL Tech

Posts with tag fonts

Filed under: Fun, Utilities

What the font?! identifies fonts from images

What the font?!
What the font from My Fonts is a web site designed to help you figure out the name of a font from a JPG file submission. For example, if you want to know what font DLS uses, capture a screen shot of some text, upload it on What the font and see what you find out.

It's pretty simple to use, just upload the image, fill in any missing letters and let the site do the work for you. I submitted several things - some that I knew the font name and some that I didn't - and always got a selection of possibilities.

There is also a forum so that if the online tool can't identify a font, other users can try their hand at it.

So, if you've had your eye on someone else's font and have been wondering what it is, now is your chance to find out.

Filed under: Design, Freeware, web 2.0

Fontspace Offers Free Social Font Downloads

We love free fonts, but sometimes the process of finding half-decent ones can be pretty annoying. Fontspace.com tries to smooth out the rough spots for free font junkies.

Instead of simply categorizing fonts, Fontspace uses the good ol' tagging system - which provides easier access to similar fonts. The broad categories on some other sites (sorry DaFont) often lead to large, tiresome lists that require a boatload of time to sift through.

Registered users can also add fonts to their favorites ; thi can be extremely useful in the event that someone - your husband , for example - accidentally forgets to back up your fonts before a reformat.

Filed under: Fun, Video

Fonts Personified: Ever wondered what Windings would look like?

Have you ever wondered what Comic Sans, Times New Romans, or Futura fonts would look, sound, and act like if they were people? Yeah, neither have we. But after watching the video above, we can't believe the thought had never occurred to us. This video from College Humor probably qualifies as the funniest thing we've ever seen. At least today.

The short film also raises some serious issues though, like who the heck comes up with the names for these fonts? And has anybody ever used wingdings for anything? Why exactly is that font taking up space in Windows?

[via Gizmodo]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Explore Windows Fonts with FontEXPRO

FontEXPRO
Are you constantly struggling to remember the difference between Arial, Times New Roman and Palatino Linotype? Sure, you could just keep changing fonts from the drop-down menus in your word processor, or you could use FontEXPRO to preview all the fonts stored on your computer and choose the right one for the job.

When you first run FontEXPRO, there's a chance the main window will just be blank. We thought that navigating to the "Windows Fonts" folder would help, but it didn't. We're guessing it didn't know where to find our fonts since we run Windows XP off of the E drive, not C. But once we clicked "Select Folder" and found the font directory, up popped a list of fonts. You can then enter some text and see how it looks under each available font.

[via Techie-Buzz]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Font Frenzy cleans out unnecessary Windows XP fonts

Font FrenzyThe more fonts you have installed on your Windows computer, the slower it boots. It's one of those basic facts of life. It's not fair, but it's true. Because Windows needs to read each and every font while it's loading, it can take 30 seconds longer to boot a system with 1000 fonts installed than one with 100.

It turns out Windows XP installs just 44 fonts. All the other fonts on your system were probably installed by other programs. And you can safely remove the majority of them. But who has the time to sift through all of those fonts one by one?

Font Frenzy simplifies things by letting you uninstall any non-Windows font with just a few clicks. Worried that you might accidentally delete fonts that you meant to keep? No problem, you can create a snapshot of your font directory which you can use as a restore point. You can reinstall all of your fonts or just pick and choose from your backup directory.

There's also a handy font viewer for seeing how various fonts look at different point-sizes, and a browser for adding and removing fonts on a case by case basis.

Keep in mind that this software is designed for Windows XP. There are several new fonts included in Windows Vista. So using Font Frenzy to remove all non-system fonts in Windows Vista could actually result in removing necessary fonts.

[via gHacks]

Filed under: Design, Text, Linux, Open Source

Get Liberation fonts for your Ubuntu desktop in one easy step


One weakness many users discover when switching to Linux is typography. Fonts are a lot more important to your computing experience than you might think, and although Ubuntu does a good job of providing some pretty core fonts, and the Microsoft font core pack can add greatly to that, Red Hat offers the Liberation Font package which in a lot of ways is superior to even Microsoft's tried and true typography.

But how do you get those great Red Hat fonts on Ubuntu? Matt of TechyStuff has created a dead simple shell script that'll have you typographying (is that a word?) to your hearts content with just one easy step. We caution users about running random shell scripts with root permissions, but we've checked this script line by line and it appears safe; Still, use at your own risk.

Filed under: Business, Design, Text, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Freeware, Design Tips

25 best free high-quality fonts

25 Best Free FontsFree fonts are everywhere online, but in most cases you get what you pay for. While many people are happy using hacked together fonts, discerning viewers notice the little things that set a well-made font apart from the wannabes.

Freelance web designer Vitaly Friedman has put together a listing of his choice of the best 25 free fonts available online, and it's very hard to argue with his choices. He plainly states that his bias is towards fonts that are useful in a business setting, rather than those that would be more at home "on a colourful teenager's homepage". Don't miss the update at the top of the post including links to new fonts Fontin (seen here) and Delicious. Beautiful stuff.

It's easy to forget that there is more out there in terms of useful business type faces than Times New Roman and Arial. Thanks to Vitaly, we can all experiment with some more interesting but still classy looking fonts in our next report or PowerPoint presentation.

Filed under: Design, Linux, Open Source

300 easily installed free fonts for Ubuntu


Ubuntu comes with loads of fonts pre-installed, and if you've goosed the power of your Ubuntu install with Automatix, you've already added several more. For the casual graphic designer though, more fonts are always welcome. Ubuntu Blog has compiled an incredible roundup of easily installable and freely available fonts for Ubuntu; all of which can be downloaded and installed with just a quick cut and paste at the command line.

[via Digg]

Filed under: Design, Developer, Internet, Text, Features, Freeware, Design Tips

Design Tip - 500 Fonts

Flipping through free font sites is not an ideal way to spend time (hate those pop-up ads) however, you can go to Fonts 500 which provides the top 500 fonts from some of the web's biggest free font archives. Here you can cull through your favorites and know that users like you found these the best to download.

Btw, the two fonts used in the Download Squad graphic are Heartland (for "Download" and Swatch (for "Squad").

[via Lifehacker]

Filed under: Text

Yet another font site, but a better one

Better fonts
BetterFonts.com has 10,000 fonts. All freeware or shareware, and available for download. Their site is well organized and makes it quick to find a bunch of new fonts. There are a lot of sites out there offering free fonts, and you come to find out that free doesn't always mean free. Betterfonts.com is free to use, the fonts are free and you are merely two clicks from having any fonts on your PC. Betterfonts is exactly that, just plain better fonts. There are a lot of dupes out there, but BetterFonts has so many fonts, you are bound to find something you can use. They had a ton of fonts I will be using in upcoming design projects.

Filed under: Design, Text, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Freeware, Unix

FontTester - compare fonts side-by-side

FontTesterAnother in line of web apps with URLs that go straight to the point, FontTester does just that - tests fonts. You get up to three columns, and therefore three different fonts can be displayed on-screen at the same time. It also includes a bunch of other cool typesetting features, like a full-featured character map, and advanced options like line-height and text-transforms (for example, SmallCaps).

Of course, the best feature of FontTester is that once you've decided that your text looks the way you want it to, you can simply click Get CSS Code, and you are presented with a dialog giving you the ability to copy and paste your CSS, with the option of choosing Type, Class or ID selector.

Font Tester CSS download dialog

Filed under: Design, Text, Utilities, Blogging

1001 free font downloads

1001freefonts.com gives you some fo the best fonts out there, for free. Go check out one of the best font sites on the web (in my pompous opinion). The site has many excellent fonts. I often peruse the site when I need font-ular inspiration for a design project. They have many spoof fonts for major brands like Subway, Batman, Star Wars, and many others. Most (if not all) fonts are in TTF (True-type Font) format, perfect for most users on both Windows and Mac. Downloading the fonts is easy and painless, not to mention that 1001freefonts.com has minimal advertising on their site. Write on the walls, why don't you? Okay, not the walls, the wife kinda frowns on that. Just think 1001 downloads all in one place. As Emeril (the chef on the Food Network) says, "Oh, yeah baby!"

Filed under: Windows, Office, Microsoft

Times New Roman retired in Office 2007

CalibriI don't have any confirmation on this, but fadtastic says that for the first time in history, Times New Roman is not the default font in Microsoft Office, its status having been usurped in Office 2007 by Microsoft's pretty new star Calibri. The venerable and ubiquitous font is still included in the office suite, of course, and the new version of Office is still in beta and things may be reshuffled again in the months before its final release, but it's still a surprising shift for a company as stalwart as Microsoft.

[Via kottke.org]

Filed under: Design, Web services

Picking a font for your Web 2.0 logo

Web 2.0 logosCloset typography geek that I am, Logos of Web 2.0 at Stephen Coles' FontFeed blog tickles my fancy. He's dissected a few dozen Web 2.0 logos that you might recognize from this image that's been floating around and picked out some font trends. If you need a logo for your newest start-up, it's veritable guide to making a modern web site logo. VAG Rundschrift and Arial Rounded Bold are particularly popular in the "softies" category, but Coles has you covered if you're looking for a futuristic or classical look instead.

[Via Waxy.org]

Filed under: Design

Best fonts of 2005 according to Typographica

Garamond Premier Pro

There's a little design geek inside me and inside him is an even littler typography geek, and that geek loves Typographica's Favorite Fonts of 2005. With fanciful names like Lisboa, Deréon, and Zingha, these are some truly beautiful fonts, but I think my favorite of the bunch may be Robert Slimbach's Garamond Premier Pro, and gorgeous update to the old serifed standby. There's also several dozen runners-up for your perusal, and this is only Part 1, comprising the first six months of the year. The article's writer, Stephen Coles, also notes the expanding role of the OpenType format and the fact that many type designers have completely abandoned PostScript and TrueType fonts in favor of OpenType.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
SXSWi 2008 Schwag Unboxing
SXSWi 2008 Day 1
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


Follow us on Twitter!

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

BloggingStocks Tech Coverage

More Tech Coverage