This is my own selection of the best free typefaces published in 2015, grouped by category.
Text typefaces: - Clara (Séamas Ó Brógáin). This typeface family also covers Greek and Cyrillic.
- Inknut Antiqua (Claus Eggers-Sørensen). An angular text typeface that will survive earthquakes and tsunamis.
- Caslon OS (Alfredo Marco Pradil). A revival typeface for those who can't afford Adobe Caslon.
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Sans typefaces: |
Type systems: |
Art deco typefaces: |
Hipster typefaces: |
Script typefaces: |
Sketched, Layered or Poster typefaces: - Pelmeshka (Cyril Mikhailov). A handcrafted fat didone for Latin and Cyrillic.
- HB Sketch (Mehmet Abaci, Studio Typo). A gorgeous sketched didone.
- Flowers Power Nega (imagex). A textured ornamental caps typeface by the prolific free font designer simply known as imagex. Shall we ever know his or her identity?
- Monstre Display (Lev Berry). A stackable system based on a model from 1882.
- Ahoj. A free all caps layered typeface family made in 2015 by the crew at Type Together, namely, Veronika Burian, Jose Scaglione, Sonja Stange, Elena Veguillas and Irene Vlachou. Ahoj is a bold display sans serif inspired by images of old signs and lettering found in different cities. The typeface family was produced in a four-day workshop in Prague. Voluntary contributions will be used to help the victims of the 2015 quake in Nepal.
- Plump (Steven Whitfield).
- ALT Smaq (Andreas Leonidou). Eight beveled styles for Latin and Greek. Download link.
- Chubby (Anders Kristoffersen). Download link.
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Blackletter typefaces: |
Dingbats and ornaments: - Asap Symbol (Tania Quindos, Marcela Romero, Elena Gonzalez Miranda and Pablo Cosgaya at Omnibus Type).
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Garalde typefaces: - Cormorant (Christian Thalmann, Open Font Library). See also CTAN.
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Display typefaces: - rBH (Morten Rostgaard Olsen, Ole Søndergaard and Henrik Birkvig). A typeface family custom designed for the identity of the city of Copenhagen.
- Infini (Sandrine Nugue). A lapidary typeface family, winner of a contest for CNAP in France in 2014.
- Blackentina (Sergiy Tkachenko).
- Red Velvetica Shadows Bold (Jeff Bensch).
- Zacatecas (Fernando Haro). For that special condensed title.
- Kayfabe (Steven Waring). Download site.
- Kanji PA (Pedro Azedo). A bilined logo font inspired by kanji.
- Pxl Supercondensed (Alberto Malossi). In Wim Crouwel's piano key style.
- Slot (by Adrien Coquet and Hugo Dath).
- George A Rebours and Georges Labeur Corps 8 (Ivan Louette). An impeccable reproduction of Georges Auriol's first typeface, a precursor of the iconic art nouveau typeface Auriol.
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Slab serif typefaces: - Ansley Display (Kady Jesko).
- Bariol Serif (Atipo). This wonderful rounded typeface family accompanies the sans family Bariol (2012) and is specifically designed for screen, mobile applications and the web. Two weights are tweetware, and the others are donationware.
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Copperplate: |
Wood type revivals: |
Letterpress emulation: - Bernier (Ryan Pyae).
- Cocogoose Letterpress (Cosimo Lorenzo Pancini at Zetafonts). Great design---too bad the free version is crippled (no numerals).
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Didone typefaces: - Libre Bodoni (Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida). Based on Morris Fuller Benton's Bodoni types, this 4-style family was developed in 2014 and published in 2015 by Open Font Library.
- Chonburi (Cadson Demak). Covers Latin and Thai.
- Goral (Ofir Shavit). A 12-style Peignotian (sans) and didone (serif) typeface family, which was made with his own software, FontArk.
- Burlesque (Fernando Paravela). In the fat face style, this typeface has great carved out design details.
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Fashion mag typefaces: |
Stencil typefaces: |
Multilingual typefaces: - Catamaran (Pria Ravichandran, Google Fonts). This family covers Latin and Tamil.
- Yantramanav (Erin McLaughlin, Google Web Fonts) is a Devanagari typeface family designed to accompany Christian Robertson's Roboto.
- Shumi (Ivan Shumikhin). A macho octagonal typeface for Latin and Cyrillic.
- Modak (Ek Type; Google Fonts). The chubbiest bubblegumiest Devanagari typeface in existence today. Modak Devanagari was designed by Sarang Kulkarni and Maithili Shingre and Modak Latin by Noopur Datye with support from Girish Dalvi and Pradnya Naik.
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Wonderful, adorable, refreshing typefaces: - Iosevka (Belleve Invis). This monospaced programming font for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic is generated by code using the parametric paradigm. A tour de force.
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