For a long time I have used
DeviantArt for the distribution of my free fonts but recently DeviantArt has introduced changes to it's website. It is moving to a new design for the website called 'Eclipse' which makes the wesite more like a mobile phone interface, it is really awful but it is now the default, you have to switch to the old website. They justify this by saying that most people who use DeviantArt do so from a mobile phone or tablet.
For the moment the old website is still available but when 'Eclipse' is fully complete the old website may not be available and all customisation features of the website are not going to be accessible on a free account, only for those who pay a monthly subscription (so called Core members).
For a long time I have thought that DeviantArt although good is not the ideal platform for distribution fo free fonts, it is an art website, it is not the first choice for those people looking for a free font.
On DeviantArt my Kelvinch font only has about 800 downloads and Munson only has about 250 but on FontSquirrel Kelvinch has over 20,000 downloads and Munson has about 14,000. I cannot control what appears on Font Squirrel, the owner of the site is the person who decides what to put up.
Of course my free fonts have appeared on many free font websites, Munson and Kelvinch have even appeared on a
Russian website which only seems to have fonts which cover Cyrillic. I cannot understand this website because it is in Russian.
I thought of GitHub but that also is not the first choice for anyone looking for a free font.
What I am looking for is a replacement for DeviantArt but perhaps a little more font oriented than art oriented.
Does anyone know of a good site ?
Comments
If you're concern is mainly widest exposure, why not use them all, regardless of whether or not you personally like them?
It depends from one site to the next, but about 50 percent of web traffic is now from mobile devices. I'm heavily involved in website design and a mobile-first strategy is becoming common because of this. Do it right, though, and the interface is optimized for both. Deviant Art is probably heavily dominated by people on mobile phones just looking at stuff killing time, which makes it less of a place to look for fonts. Besides, it's a commonly blocked site in many corporate environments. People looking for fonts — free or otherwise — are probably doing so from a computer where they want to install those fonts. In other words, a desktop or laptop machine.
For what it's worth, I'm deeply suspicious of these sites. They're all brimming with junk and pirated fonts. Some will remove pirated fonts when asked, but within weeks, they're often back. Personally, the only free font site I'll download anything from is Google Fonts. If others with similar ethical and quality standards exist, I'd like to know about them.
If Dafont is taking steps to deal with pirated fonts, that's great. I haven't checked lately. When I do searches on most of the other free sites, I can usually find pirated copies of my own work as well as the work of many others on this forum.
By junk, I was referring mostly to the RIP-crashing varieties with crazy kinks, paths that loop back on themselves, autotraced glyphs, stray points and no care paid to the most basic of things. I know a guy who runs a sign shop. He tells me that about a quarter of the print jobs he gets containing these kinds of free fonts fail to make it through their printers' RIPs. As for aesthetics, as you said, one's taste is another matter.
@Cory Maylett If it helps, I just checked and we are currently at 72% desktop, 25% mobile, and 3% tablet for very high traffic. As for ethical standards, FontSpace pursues that as a continual goal. We are moderating all new fonts, verifying licenses, etc.. Eventually we'll have a more automated process that actually checks for clones / rip-offs via glyph recognition.
Paul Miller said: @Paul Miller There are a TON of "junk" fonts by those standards, even on FontSpace. Some of these are created by people who are getting their feet wet, making their first font, and sharing it. Surprisingly, people still download and use these fonts (a lot of the free font community is hobbyists). My focus for the future is to implement something like how Google ranks websites. There are multiple ranking factors, and technical quality / # glyphs, etc.. will be some of those ranking factors to help keep the junk less visible.
Absolutely agree. We get so many people uploading commercial fonts as their own, or their auto-traced handwriting via MyScriptFont-like services. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to moderate submissions.
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Everyone, I just joined yesterday after seeing fontspace being mentioned here and wanted to give helpful responses.
Free fonts is my industry, so I'll watch these forums for other questions in this field. I have spent many years doing this, and I know ALL the free font websites.