ITF Launches Free Font Service Fontshare

ITF (the Indian Type Foundry) has launched a brand new font service to bring beautiful typography to every business for free.

The service, named Fontshare, will be familiar to anyone who has used Google Fonts. Browse the fonts list, pick out the styles you want, and add them to your site.

It’s a well-designed site; there are several options for browsing, list or grid views, editable sample text, and even a type layout tester.

There are two embedding options available, you can link to Fontshare’s API, or you can download the fonts in OTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats for self-hosting — considering the so-far untested nature of Fontshare’s CDN, the latter option is safer until the service has run for a few months.

All of the fonts on Fontshare are owned by ITF, and there are no plans to extend the service to cover other foundries. As a result, there are far fewer fonts available than on Google Fonts. However, the fonts’ quality is consistently excellent and higher than many proffered by Google’s service. ITF is so confident in its craftsmanship that letters are presented with their outlines so you can examine their curves.

Fontshare currently boasts 50 typefaces, and moving forward, ITF has pledged to make 25% of its Latin typefaces available for free. It’s an extremely generous gesture and one that can only benefit the design community.