Free Web Templates

With thousands of different typefaces on offer, it’s vital to have a select few that act as pillars in your collection. The following 13 Free Fonts (shown in alphabetical order) are ones that I believe every graphic designer should be familiar with.

Akzidenz Grotesk, the first ever sans-serif typeface to be widely used, was originally released in 1898, by the H. Berthold AG type foundry. At first glance, it can sometimes be mistaken for the Helvetica or Univers typefaces.

Head over to Typophile if you want to learn more about the roots of Akzidenz Grotesk.

Akzidenz is available to buy from Linotype, under the name Basic Commercial. The font family was renamed based on Linotype’s digitization of the typeface, which can also be bought under the Akzidenz name from other type resources.

The Avenir typeface was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988. Linotype interviewed Adrian Frutiger and asked him about the reasons for the new design of Avenir, its special characteristics and potential uses. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Looking back on more than 40 years of concern with sans serif typefaces, I felt an obligation to Design Tutorials a linear style of sans serif, in the tradition of Erbar™, Futura®, and to a lesser extent Gill Sans®. These have purely constructed characters from which the element of a handwriting movement has been removed. Obviously this could not be an outstanding new creation, but I have tried to make use of the experience and stylistic developments of the 20th century in order to work out an independent alphabet meeting modern typographical needs.

The city of Amsterdam uses Avenir extensively in its graphic identity. BBC2 has also begun to use Avenir as its main corporate font for its channel Logo Design and identity, another shift away from the once universal use of the Gill Sans font across all of the BBC’s output.

Bodoni is the name given to a series of serif typefaces first designed by Giambattista Bodoni in 1798.

This typeface has a narrower underlying structure with flat, unbracketed serifs. The face has extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes, and an overall geometric construction.

Dave Farey at Fonthaus has written an interesting article, discussing the confusion in the market over the many different types of Bodoni that are available.

There are numerous siblings, third and fourth cousins, plus poor relations of doubtful parentage, cloaked under the protection of the Bodoni name, creating confusion and ultimately disenchantment.

Your design Needs has been with us for decades. Its heritage is a bit obscure. Born in Italy, Eurostile had two designers, and two release dates, even if purists might insist that it really just had one of each. Without a doubt, the typeface has had two official names. Of course, the first of those two names – Your design Needs – only refers to part of the final Design Training. After many years, Linotype is releasing an extended revision and update, named Eurostile Next. Confused?

Once a few signposts in the Eurostile history are defined, things become much clearer. The type was created as an uppercase-only face and was drawn by Alessandro Butti, with help from a young assistant named Aldo Novarese. Novarese would go on to become one of Italy’s premier typeface designers, but in 1952, the release of this all-caps titling face revolved around Butti and the foundry where he worked, Nebiolo.

The Design Tutorials in question was called Micrograms, and it was intended strictly for display composition. Micrograms was a real “Titling Design.” To have this classification in the old hot metal type days meant much more than just being all-caps; a titling design would have its capital letters go all the way to the edge of the top of the lead sort. “72-point titling caps” were much larger than 72 point caps from a regular font. Even if you had wanted to mix Micrograms’ letters with lowercase letters from another Free Font of type, it would have been very difficult.