Dancing Script
Impallari TypeSphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
Handwriting · Variable · 4 weights · OFL · Türkçe
Free Murray Hill alternatives
Emil Klumpp for ATF, 1956, and the casual connecting script of American mid-century advertising.
Why people look for a Murray Hill alternative
Murray Hill is a mid-century American script with a casual, confident bounce — the handwriting of a 1950s advertisement rather than of a person. It is licensed, it exists in few weights, and what people want from it is the rhythm rather than any particular letter.
What a Murray Hill substitute has to get right
A brush-drawn script that joins, on a shallow slope, informal without being childish. A formal broad-nib script is a different register entirely.
The one in this archive
One entry, because one is the honest answer. A face is listed here only if the substitution would survive a designer looking at both.
Murray Hill and its free alternatives, at a glance
- How you get it
- Bought from a foundry under a commercial licence
- Pass it on, embed it or self-host it
- Only as the licence you bought allows
- On a website
- Usually a separate web licence on top
Murray Hill
| Property | Dancing Script |
|---|---|
| Licence | OFL-1.1 — free, commercial use allowed |
| Weights | 400, 500, 600, 700 |
| Variable | Yes |
| Italic | No |
| Türkçe | Yes |
| Other alphabets | Vietnamese |
| Glyphs | 643 |
| Web font | 58 KB |
Questions
- What is the best free alternative to Murray Hill?
- Dancing Script — it is the closest match in this archive, and the page above says which shapes the substitution turns on. It is the only one listed, because one honest match is a better answer than a longer list of near misses.
- Are these Murray Hill alternatives free for commercial use?
- Yes. Every font on this site is under a licence that permits commercial use with no fee and no attribution requirement, mostly the SIL Open Font License. That covers paid client work, products you sell, self-hosting on a website, and embedding in an application. The licence file is inside every download.
- Can I use a Murray Hill alternative in a logo?
- Yes. An open font licence covers the font software rather than the shapes you set with it, so a logo made with one of these can be trademarked like any other. What you cannot do is claim rights over the typeface itself.
- Will a Murray Hill substitute keep my layout the same?
- Only if it is metrically compatible — drawn so every character occupies the same width as the original, which makes a document reflow identically. Very few faces are, and where one is, this site says so on its page. Everything else will look similar and set differently, so a layout built to the original's widths needs checking rather than assuming.