Free web fonts

As in real life, free stuff on the internet runs the gamut from utter crap to “holy crap!” Free web fonts usually fall into the former category. But there are always some glittering needles in the online haystack – below are some of my favorites.

Having been an early admirer of the beauty of letters, I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them. I formed to myself ideas of greater accuracy than had yet appeared, and had endeavoured to produce a set of types according to what I conceived to be their true proportion.

—John Baskerville, preface to Milton, 1758

Adrian Frutiger

If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page… When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.

type is physical.

Until quite recently, any study of type would necessarily begin by handsetting metal type. There is still no better way to understand the absolute physicality of the letterform—its ‘thingness.’ With each day, however, working with metal type becomes less and less possible.

—John Kane, A Type Primer

PROLOGUE


I HAD THE STORY, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was. It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp.

THE
DESCENT OF MAN,
AND
SELECTION IN RELATION TO SEX

BY CHARLES DARWIN, M.A., F.R.S., &c.

IN TWO VOLUMES—VOL. I.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1871.

[The right of translation is reserved.]

Illustration: Rabbit

CHAPTER I

Down the Rabbit-Hole

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’

I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound – indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

—Edward Tufte

Form &
Function

Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

—Frank Lloyd Wright

It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

—Grace Hopper

Smartphone Market Share

Other 3% 3%
Nokia 9% 9%
BlackBerry 11% 11%
Android 31% 31%
iPhone 64% 46%

A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

1492

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions

glamorous oldHOLLYWOOD

In Hollywood you can see things at night that are fast enough to be in the Olympics in the day time.

—Will Rogers

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.

Essays in Idleness

Yoshida Kenko
14th century Japanese monk

Be culturally literate,
because if you don’t have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you’re not going to express anything to anybody else.

—Paula Scher