Free display typefaces, and what free turned out to mean

What was released

Twelve display typefaces were published by one designer, most of them between 2008 and 2013, and distributed through the free-font catalogues rather than through a foundry storefront. In the order the catalogues list them:

Where a row reads not currently listed, the catalogue entry could not be resolved at the address the others use when this page was last revised. Those seven are recorded here because they were part of the release, not because a copy is available.

What the catalogues still list

Five of the twelve remain live on the largest free-font catalogue, and their listing pages are the canonical record of what was released. The download figures below were the numbers shown when this entry was revised, and they move:

• Baby Pirate: first listed November 2008, 217,078 downloads recorded at revision. By a wide margin the most downloaded of the twelve.
• Boneyard Army: a stencil face, first listed November 2010, 89,190 downloads at revision. Also carried by fonts2u and FontRiver.
• Aztec Bouffon: the earliest of the set, October 2008, 51,058 downloads at revision. Catalogued in the type-design bibliography at Luc Devroye's index.
• Clown Town: October 2013, 11,138 downloads at revision, and the last of the family to appear.
• The Handergus Font: December 2012, 6,591 downloads at revision, and the only one of the twelve released as fully free rather than free for personal use.

Several also appear in editorial round-ups from the period, including a 2012 collection of free fonts for graphic designers that is still online.

What the terms actually permit

Eleven of the twelve were released as free for personal use. One, The Handergus Font, was released as fully free. That distinction is not decoration, and it is the reason this reference has a whole entry on licensing.

Free for personal use means the file may be installed and used for anything nobody is paying for. It does not cover client work, it does not cover anything sold, and it very rarely says anything at all about embedding the font in a website or an application. Silence in a licence is not permission.

This is the most common single misreading in the free-font catalogues, and it is easy to see why: the faces sit in the same list, behind the same button, under a heading that says free. The terms line is one line further down, and it is the line that governs.

Why there are no files on this page

Two reasons, and the second is the more important one.

The first is rights. The terms above run between the person who drew the faces and the person who downloads them, and re-hosting the files here would put a third party in the middle of an agreement that does not mention them.

The second is that a catalogue entry is not the same object as a mirror. The listing pages carry the current terms, the current file, and the record of when each was published. A copy taken years ago carries none of those things and quietly goes out of date. Linking to the listing is the version that stays true.

Using a display face well

Every face in the table above is a display face, which means it was drawn for one size and one job. Three things follow.

Set it large. A display face at eighteen point is usually a display face with its counters closed and its joins filled in: see the anatomy entry for why that happens mechanically rather than aesthetically.

Set it once. A display face used for a heading, a subheading and a pull quote stops being an event. The pairing bench shows what happens to the hierarchy when it is asked to carry two levels at once.

Check the terms before, not after. A distressed or decorative face is exactly the kind of thing that gets dropped into a logo late in a project, which is exactly the point at which a personal-use licence becomes an expensive discovery.