How to choose a free font — and check its licence before you use it

Picking a font is one of those small design decisions that quietly decides whether your work looks finished or falls apart. A good free font can carry a whole poster, logo or website; the wrong one can make even careful work hard to read. Here is a practical way to choose, before you download anything.

1. Start with the job, not the font

Fonts do different work in different places, so decide what the text has to do first:

Logo: It has to read at tiny sizes and still feel like you. A clean sans serif or a strong display face usually works. Save flowing scripts for accent words rather than the main wordmark.
Poster: You get big sizes and short headlines, so display fonts can shine — but check that the words still read from across the room.
Website: People will read paragraphs, not headlines, so pick something genuinely legible in long blocks, with a regular and a bold weight so you can build a simple hierarchy.
Invitation: This is where a script or decorative face earns its place. Even here, check that names and dates stay readable, and pair the decorative face with a plain one for the details.

Shortlist by use case first, and you stop scrolling through hundreds of lookalikes and start comparing a handful of real candidates.

2. Check the format: TTF or OTF

Most free fonts come as TTF (TrueType) or OTF (OpenType), and both work in the tools most people use. TTF is the older, widely supported format, so if you just need a font that installs and works, it is usually the safe pick. OTF can carry extra features such as alternate characters and ligatures, which matter if you want a script font to look handwritten rather than assembled. DaFont Online organises its library by format as well as by style, so if you know your software handles one format better, filter for it first. Whichever you pick, install it once, restart the app you plan to use it in, and confirm it appears where you expect it.

3. Check the licence on each font page

This is the step people skip, and the one that matters most. 'Free' does not automatically mean 'free for any use'. Licences vary from font to font: many are free for personal use, some are free for commercial use, and some recommend buying a commercial licence if the font will appear in something you sell or promote.

So before a font goes into a client project, a product, an ad or anything that earns money, open the licence information on that font's own page and read it. If it says personal use only, treat that literally and find an alternative. Keeping a note of the licence alongside the font file takes a minute and saves real trouble later.

4. Try your own words in a generator first

Before downloading, type your actual headline, or the names and dates from your invitation, into a free font generator. Seeing your own text — with its capitals, numbers and punctuation — tells you far more than the sample alphabet on a listing. Check the spacing, check the numbers, and check any accented characters you need. If the font breaks on your real words, it was never the right one.