Crimson Text, from Toronto-based designer Sebastian Koch who says “Crimson Text is a font family for book production in the tradition of beautiful oldstyle typefaces.  There are a lot of great free fonts around, but one kind is missing: those Garamond-inspired types with all the little niceties like oldstyle figures, small caps, fleurons, math characters and the like. In fact, a lot of time is spend developing free knock-offs of ugly “standards” like Times and Helvetica. Crimson Text is inspired by the fantastic work of people like Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler. I hope that the free type community will one day be able to enjoy Crimson Text as a beautiful workhorse.”  Definitely a nice face worth checking out, even though it is still in its early stages. Download the Crimson Text TTF.

From Copenhagen, Denmark based first time font creator Johan Aakerlund comes Comfortaa in Thin, Regular and Bold weights. Johan says “I hope you can use my font – please share it with the world” and that’s what we’re trying to do. Comforta features smooth, rounded edges, remains legible at all sizes, has 466 characters and symbols to support most European conuntries and it looks damn good! Download Comfortaa Truetype fonts!

Surface is from Bruno Herfst at Sauce Design in the Netherlands, a very nice medium weight humanist sans-serif font. Falls somewhere between text and display, very friendly. not too hard – not too soft, just right. Lots of foreign characters and such. Download Surface Medium OTF file.

Hattori Hanzo, a Creative Commons typeface from Moscow Based Roman Shamin is a font that was created for catchy headings and short blocks of text and body copy. It’s nice, clean and legible with lots of international-ability. Download Hattori-Hanzo OTF!

Cardo from Fonts for Scholars in Rye, New York is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists.  Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters.  It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.

This font is my version of a typeface cut for the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and first used to print Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna.  This font has been revived in modern times under several names (Bembo, Aetna, Aldine 401).  I chose it mainly because it is a classic book face, suitable for scholarship, and also because it is easier to get various diacritics sized and positioned for legibility with this design than with some others.  I added a set of Greek characters designed to harmonize well on the page with the Roman letters as well as many other characters useful to scholars.  The Hebrew characters are designed to match those used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as closely as possible and so have no claim to originality.  Download Cardo 99 TTF.

Gentium from SIL is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional ‘extended’ Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both polytonic and monotonic Greek, including a number of alternate forms.  Download Gentium Truetype font.

A creative commons typeface called Acid (personal edition), supplied in Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, Medium and Medium Italic! Thanks to designer Stephan Baum, of Trier, Germany. Acid reminds me of a less chunky version of a nice face from t26 called Dubius, with maybe a little bit of Franklin Gothic Light in the mix. Modern, legible, maybe a little grotesk, a nice all around face that has a lot of uses – and the six version really help! (two fonts in a row from designers based in Trier, and it was totally unplanned.. Trier is font central these days, it seems!) Download the Acid family of six OTF faces.