What To Choose Between Free, Paid, And Custom Fonts?

pexels-skylar-kang-6045366

What to choose between free, paid, and custom fonts?

There isn’t a wrong answer, and it all depends on what you want to achieve, on your goals, budget, and so on.

I will tell you the benefits for each of these categories of fonts so you can make your own decision.

Why go with free fonts?

Most people choose free fonts because, of course, they are free.

But also because most of the free fonts are quite good.

Google Fonts is a great example of a place that will help you get the right free fonts for your projects.

Over 60 million websites use Google Fonts and numbers heavily increase each day.

So going back to the original question, why should you use free fonts?

Here are the answers I can think for:

– Free to use for both private and commercial projects.

– Plenty of fonts to choose from.

– Most of these free fonts are highly popular and work excellently in all languages, sizes, weights, and devices.

– Absolutely no legal problems if you pay attention to the license. Even if the fonts are free, some are free just for private projects, so if you want to use them commercially, you have to pay or ask for permission.

Free fonts are always good to start with, especially if you don’t have deep knowledge in typography.

Are paid fonts better?

Yes, and no.

Some paid fonts are better than certain free fonts, but only if they are used correctly.

This is the same as having a $10,000 mirrorless camera that you don’t know how to use. It happened to me.

The camera is super advanced but I, the user, is not.

So, the pictures look worse than on my iPhone which is just $1,000, so 10 times less.

Going back to paid fonts, they are nice to have but you have to know very well which ones to get, and how to properly use them.

Most times, you have to decide which weight, and style, you want, and you pay strictly for that.

If you want the complete font file, you will pay much more.

And you might not need all the weights for example.

If you see paid fonts that won’t cost you a fortune, you should give it a try.

Once you start using premium fonts, it is very hard to go back to free fonts.

It is addictive, so think well. 🙂

Now let’s discuss about custom fonts.

Custom fonts are the future?

Custom fonts are of 2 kinds:

– Fonts created from scratch on your needs.

– Variable fonts as Google Fonts name them.

For the first option, you will have to pay.

How much?

It depends just on you, your needs, and your budget.

You can start from a few hundred bucks (you won’t get too much for this amount), and go up to probably millions of dollars.

If you find an affordable, yet nice font creation service, you should try it.

Custom fonts are the future, and even from now you can see that many companies are using their very own created fonts.

The second option is to use variable fonts, which are 100% free, at least at Google Fonts.

This is super cool way of having your own custom font, for free.

You go to Google Fonts; you select Variable fonts in the filters and you will see all the fonts that can be customized.

Roboto Flex is by far my favorite and you should try it right now.

What To Choose Between Free and paid fonts

Play with all the option and create your very own Roboto Flex font.

Conclusions

The very most important advice that you can get for picking the right fonts for your projects is to pick fonts that work well with your design, product or service feeling, and company branding.

In the end, that is the most important thing you should achieve.

After that point, you can go further in typography and upgrade your font.