What’s the deal with free fonts and when can you use them? We asked ITF, Monotype and CoType

In the vast world of branding, typefaces wield significant power over how a brand is perceived, shaping its visual identity and its communication with its audience. Typically, designers and studios either secure a typeface licence or commission custom iterations to ensure their client work resonates. But let’s consider an alternative – free and open-source fonts. What exactly are free fonts? How do they impact the graphic and type design industries? Who do they benefit? To better understand the enigma of free fonts, we delved into these questions in a two-part series and asked three industry experts for their hot takes – Satya Rajpurohit, Co-founder of Indian Type Foundry (ITF) and Founder of Fontshare; Tom Foley, Executive Creative Director at Monotype; and Mark Bloom, Creative Director and Founder of CoType Foundry. Here, they help us dig into the various classifications of free typefaces, their quality, and provide insights that every designer should keep in their back pocket. Let’s get one question cleared up – what even is a ‘free font’? Ask a handful of designers, and there’s no guarantee they’ll all give you the same answer. Is it a ‘free’ trial font? Or part of a wider subscription service? What about those pre-installed on your computers? Some of us even remember being shown ‘free’ fonts on one of those compilation sites with a barefaced and aggressively capitalised name like FREEFONTS4U. To get to the bottom of what a ‘free’ typeface means, Tom Foley gives us the low-down of what’s out there. ‘Open-source’ typefaces, as the name would imply, should be pretty straightforward to navigate, right? For instance, those available on Google Fonts, are freely accessible to the public and can be modified as needed. However, this flexibility can lead to complexities and issues if the modifications are not handled by professionals with expertise in typeface design and font engineering. Furthermore, while all the typefaces on the site are commissioned by Google and designed by seasoned foundries, they’re intentionally built to be used on websites and in Google’s products. “This may seem obvious, but it is a key point,” Foley says, “Google’s currency is data. Every time a Google font hosted on Google servers is used on a website, it becomes another entry point for user data collection.”