March 24, 2011

40 wonderful free vintage fonts

Day 83 of Vintage 365


 

There is something undeniably magical about the subject of typography. A great deal of the material we've read and written - on the most ordinary of things like cereal box packaging to incredibly important documents like marriage certificates - in our lives has been printed, and thus had a typeface of one kind or another. Many fonts are fairly mundane; they're beautiful and handy workhorses, but they're not not exactly the typographic equivalent of Elizabeth Taylor's diamonds.

I'm fascinating by fonts - especially antique and vintage ones, or those modern equivalents that look as if they could have easily appeared on a billboard sixty years ago. Delving in the art of scrapbooking last autumn really stirred up my interest in typography and the world of fonts again, and as one might imagine, I went hunting for a trove of vintage fonts.

Numerous websites provided lists of free fonts that have an old school bent to them, but by far the best list I encountered was one called 40 Free Fonts Ideal For Retro And Vintage Designs on the site bluefaqs.

Don't let the word "retro" potentially put you off of checking this page - which comes complete with a colourful example of each font in use (such as the classically lovely "Diner Regular" below) – out. Though some of the 40 fonts are a bit better suited to the 60s and 70s, many of them truly look as though they really could have been plucked from the rip-roaring 20s, art deco 30s, fast paced 40s, or chicly elegant 50s. (All forty fonts are delightfully free and can be downloaded from various free font websites.)



 

I look at this collection of vintage fonts and my mind goes into creative overdrive! I'm struck by the urge to suddenly print personal stationery, create cover pages for everything I type right down to my grocery lists, knock out scrapbook page after vintage font adorned scrapbook page, send my pen pals letters in old school fonts, and escape into a typographical haze in which I forget entirely that such commonplace fonts as Times New Roman or Arial even exist.

Swing by this great list, my dears, and treat yourself to a bevy of gorgeous free vintage fonts - I can promise you that you'll come up for tons of wonderfully creative uses for oodles of them.


6 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing! I love different fonts, and it's even better when you can them for free. Can't wait to try some of these out :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for sharing honey. Hope you're having a great week!

    You probably already know, but did you hear my great news yesterday? Kori xoxo

    http://www.blondeepisodes.com/2011/03/wordless-wednesday-and-great-news.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well I saw the word 'free' on my sidebar so had to head over here immediately! And fonts...topography is art isn't it...am heading over there now...thank you Jessica!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you Jessica - I am off to check out these fonts now!!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you so much for directing me to these, what can I say... just what I have been looking for, for quite a while!
    Thank you!!!
    Blog header change is on its way!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thank you so much. I make vintage cards for birthdays and so on. This font set will go very well with those. I didn't even know such a site existed.

    ReplyDelete