Chris Dickman (bio)

FF Dingbests and Baskerville Old Face seem to have taken up permanent residence there, but newly posted is the somewhat staid FF Clan Narrow Bold and the peppy Brody, Harold Broderson's ode to mid-50's signboard lettering.

Jos Buivenga makes four of his fonts available for free download, of which the most successful to my mind is the whimsical Fertigo.

Archive Type specializes in resurrecting old fonts from the most unlikely places. They've cobbled together a free font containing a mix of letters from their various offerings, Archive Type Mix 1, just the thing for a retro ransom note.

Australian Type Foundry is the work of designer Wayne Thompson, who has chosen to make his Virus font freely available.

Veer distributes several of the Autodidakt foundry's creations, so you know they do nice stuff. In an interesting twist on the free font scenario, you can receive a copy of the Autostyler font simply by asking for it. I wish more small foundries would follow this approach, building relationships with potential customers one email at a time. Note that the font won't be sent to Hotmail or similar email accounts—the designer really does want to know who the recipient is.

French designer Christophe Féray is making a growing collection of free fonts available via his WC FONTS site, including the aptly-named Fetish symbol font.

Finally, it's been around a while but it's still worth mentioning Silkscreen, a pixel font available in two weights on the Kottke.org site. Calling it ubiquitous would be a stretch but it has shown up on everything from Sephora.com to the Volvo site. If you've never used a pixel font, which can be particularly handy for multimedia work, this is as good a place to get your feet wet as anywhere.

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Chris Dickman
Graphics.com