9 Best Type Foundries for When You’re Sick of Google Fonts
Google Fonts might be the de facto first choice of many web designers, but there are many more web font options out there if you know where to look.
- Filtering and sorting so you can quickly find the typefaces that matches what you need;
- A bountiful set of type resources;
- A modern selection of typefaces — this means they’re mostly minimally designed serifs and sans serifs. Outlined type as well as hand-lettered nostalgic type are also accounted for;
- Multilingual-friendly typefaces;
- Reasonable prices.
1. Colophon Foundry

- There’s an impressive and expansive portfolio of multilingual typography to leverage;
- Fonts can be previewed as white-on-black, black-on-white (Dark Mode!) and sometimes in other color combinations;
- You can use the Google Chrome extension to test Colophon fonts on your website before buying.
2. Dalton Maag

- It has a great selection of modern and clean typography designs;
- Many fonts have case studies you can peruse to see real world uses for them (and get inspiration for your project);
- Most typefaces work with more than one alphabet (e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek) and you can quickly see a preview of those glyphs by scrolling through the font sliders.
3. Emigre Fonts

- It has a reasonably-sized collection of stylish fonts (there are less than a hundred as of writing this);
- Fonts can be filtered by family, style, and language making it much easier to narrow your search;
- Examples of their fonts can be seen everywhere, from the Type Specimens page to Emigre Magazine back issues.
4. Fontfabric

- While users have to pay for most fonts, there’s a great selection of free fonts (or font intros) to work with, too;
- Many of the premium fonts allow you to review the full glyph map, test the font with custom text, and see a relevant case study;
- Good option for web designers building sites and apps for readers of Cyrillic alphabets (e.g. Russian, Bulgarian, Kazakh).
5. The League of Moveable Type

- All fonts are 100% free to use;
- For typography designers in training, the open source fonts provide a great base for learning and practice;
- It’s a small collection, but you’ll find a good mix of font styles to play with.
6. Lucas Fonts

- Although there are a few decorative, hand-drawn fonts here and there, most of the collection is classic in design;
- You’ll find a great selection of fonts for news sites, magazines, and blogs;
- The “In Use” page is a great source of inspiration if you need help placing fonts in the context of design.
7. Monotype

- Massive library of fonts — not just from Monotype, but from its subfoundries: Linotype, Bitstream, FontShop, and International Typeface Corporation;
- New releases are often inspired by well-known and popular fonts from the Monotype collection;
- Licensing fonts is a simple and easy process through MyFonts.
8. Paratype

- Among popular typefaces like PT Sans, Proxima, and Futura, you’ll find a huge selection of equally beautiful typography designs to work with;
- Many of the fonts will give you a closer look at multilingual use cases;
- There’s always a great selection of “Specials”, so look to those if you’re intimidated by the cost of full-priced fonts.
9. Sudtipos

- You’ll find serifs and sans serifs, though Sudtipos is overflowing with beautiful cursive and handwritten scripts;
- There are no surprises when it comes to pricing — costs are published right away;
- This collection is especially useful for designers that specialize in branding and advertising design.
Wrap-Up
Sure, Google might make it easy (and cheap) to try out different fonts for your web design projects. But what if there’s something specific you’re looking for that you just can’t seem to find in Google’s font repository? If you look at the type foundries above, you’ll see why these companies are the best. They’re not producing the same old designs over and over again. They continue to innovate in the space and have produced libraries of fonts that web designers can use to build impressive websites, apps, branding, and more.WDD Staff
WDD staff are proud to be able to bring you this daily blog about web design and development. If there's something you think we should be talking about let us know @DesignerDepot.
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