Free display fonts

A display face is drawn to be set large, and that permission is what makes it different rather than the style. The spacing is tight because it will be read at a glance rather than word by word. The contrast can be extreme because it will not be rendered at 14 pixels. The details — a spur, a swelled terminal, an unusual g — are there to be seen, and below about forty pixels they close up into mud.

The first mistake is using one for anything longer than a line or two. The second is using one at a size it was not drawn for and concluding the font is badly made. If a display face looks cramped, try it twice as large before changing it; more often than not the face is fine and the size is wrong.

The second decision is how much personality the project can carry. A display face is a voice, and a strong one dates faster than a neutral one. That is a reason to use it for a poster and a reason to think twice for a logo somebody has to live with for ten years. Setting it against a plain body face is what keeps it from taking over the page.

Practically: check the character set before committing. Display faces are the category most likely to be drawn for one alphabet and one case, and finding out that the accented characters or the numerals are missing after the layout is built is a bad afternoon. Every page here lists what the file actually contains, read from the font rather than claimed.