For the past few months I've been working up to this launch of Free Fonts - it's a collection of completely free, open source, and original fonts that can be used for any project, including commercial ones.
The collection has over 400 fonts in a variety of novel styles, from simple sans serifs to decorative handwritten and blackletter fonts. It will also continue to be updated and grow over time.
Designers and developers today have essentially two options when it comes to choosing and creating fonts. Either use a Google Font, which can be limited in terms of unique and novel selections, or pay a significant amount of money for font licenses from a few large players in the space like Monotype. The problem today is that it can be difficult to find a novel, unique font for an affordable price. Our hope is that this collection can be a starting point for solving this problem.
What makes this project different is that every font in the collection was generated completely by AI, and is a novel set of letterforms. This is what makes it possible for me to launch the project with confidence that these fonts can be freely used in any type of project.
The AI workflow behind this project is also accessible on the same site. Our model was trained on a variety of images across the internet and then runs a full pipeline to transform a consistent set of letters into a single downloadable TTF font file. It can be prompted from a text prompt, or a sample image that contains an image of some text.
Font licensing is a complex world, and I deeply believe that it is ripe for a change. My hope is that this launch can spark a new conversation on the future of typography and how it can be freely and easily used by designers and developers over time.
Hope that you enjoy, and would love your feedback about the project and also the fonts themselves.
Eric
