This is a (paid) review of UrbanFonts.com, a website for free fonts.
A designer can never have too many fonts in my opinion, but finding them is always a problem. A lot of free font sites litter you with advertisements and pop-ups, and are hard to navigate, but UrbanFonts seems to be a breath of fresh air…
Upon visiting Urban Fonts, you are welcomed with a nice clean interface, showing categories, tags, a search, and some featured fonts.
Navigating the fonts was a piece of cake. For the casual browser you have a choice of browsing categories and tags, and for someone looking for a particular font they have the search. Great ideas, I haven’t seen a free font site with tagged fonts before. You can also view the top 100 fonts, useful if your just browsing.
If you’ve visited before, its useful to see the New fonts page to see whats been recently added, this is good but I think it could be improved with an RSS feed which I couldn’t see anywhere.
Viewing fonts is again a joy, hovering over a font name lets you preview the alphabet, which is a very useful feature and makes browsing the archive more enjoyable. There are also tool-tip previews on category names. Downloading the fonts is nice and fast, no hanging about on this site.
Going deeper..
So what else does urban fonts have to offer? Well, as well as the free fonts there are free dingbats (picture fonts), a blog (with articles about typography and fonts, very useful), and a forum.
There are also commercial fonts, which are sometimes needed if you need that special, high quality font ever.
This site has no obtrusive adverts, just some google ads which are perfectly acceptable.
My verdict
Urban fonts seems to be a good, clean, valuable resource for fonts and articles on typography. I will be using this in the future, because it beats those free pop-up infested font sites any day. Well done.
I rate it 7/10.
1 - Qwest says:
Nice review! Like yourself, i’ve used UrbanFonts in the past, and it’s a good resource.. However, it doesn’t have an RSS feed for the latest fonts added, and I dont think i’ve ever seen this on a font site!
Would make me use it more if it did have an RSS feed!
Comment made on March 1, 2007 at 10:17 am
2 - Free Rpg says:
Urban font is actualy pretty good and i am not paid to say that haha. I use it often, it’s as good as a pay site, but for free.
Comment made on November 8, 2007 at 4:41 am
3 - Foxinni - Wordpress Designer says:
Urban Fonts is great. Many of my wordpress designs contain custom elements and I use all the fonts i download from them. Great Site! Really
Comment made on January 22, 2008 at 8:41 pm