I was looking at fonts a few nights ago, looking for something techie and neat to do a banner or something for my weblog. I am not sure how I came upon it, but I found a site, FontSpace, that had an interesting way of filtering their fonts. You can elect to “only show commercial-use fonts”, as well as “show adult-themed fonts” (I don’t know what that would be, except maybe genitalia or people having sex… in the shapes of letters). I wasn’t sure what commercial-use meant in this context, but this site is cool enough that it has a link on every font page next to the license that explains it.
They have a lot of licenses listed there, and I wish there was a way to fine tune the search even more, perhaps by checking which category or specific licenses you wanted to see. I mean, shareware and freeware aren’t technically licenses, so it isn’t helpful to me. I found this to be true when I was looking at a couple of cute fonts made by Flop Design. FontSpace said they were okay for commercial use. When I downloaded the zip it had a document inside that clearly stated otherwise. I know that doesn’t correlate with licensing, since any site that receives submissions are going to have problems like that. However, it becomes a lot easier if there is a Creative Commons or Open Font License included.
Fortunately FontSpace has a contact form for the case of a font being incorrectly submitted, and the day after I brought it to their attention I got this:
Thank you Maiki, I’ve updated the licenses for those fonts and will go through and update the rest.
Not bad. I applaud them for that, and for an overall decent site (though, ads, ugh).
What this also makes me wonder is if there is a need for a repository for free fonts that focuses on copyleft-ish licenses. As I was going through the site I was skipping over everything that wasn’t public domain, CC, or OFL. I would like a place where all the fonts were like that.