Tip #72 - Great FREE Fonts for Downloading

100 Computer Tips in 100 Days

A colleague pointed out I was using
an old Microsoft logo.
Here is the current one

Tip #72 - Great FREE Fonts for Downloading

If you love experimenting with fonts as much as I do, you’ll love Google’s free font downloading service.  Over 600 fonts are now available and the number is growing daily. You can download as many of them as you want.  Just go to www.Google.com/fonts and start having fun.

Use the filter tools on the left of the screen to limit your selection. Click the “Add to Collection” button to save your choices. When you’re finished making your selections click the “Download Your Collection” link in the upper right side of the screen. You’ll see a window telling you that you don’t have to download to use the fonts on the internet but you’ll need to download them for use on your computer. This will download a zip file with all of your fonts. Once the zip file is downloaded you need to open it and extract all of the font files. Unfortunately this does not install them. To do that you need to double click on each font and then click the Install button. It sounds like a lot of work but it’s well worth the effort.

When you’re looking for fonts to download consider choosing fonts with multiple styles. Click the “Show all styles” link to preview the font family. Four styles will generally give you normal, bold, italic and bold italic. Fonts with greater style choices will print better than those with just one style. You can change the sample text that’s displayed for the fonts. This is helpful if you want to use the font for specific group of words. Some fonts are clearer for individual letters than others.

So now that you have lots more fonts to choose from, promise me you won’t be using Comic Sans anymore.

Happy computing!