First, find the font you wish to download.
Some of my favorite places for free fonts are:
Some of my favorite places for paid fonts are:
- Creative Market
- Etsy
- Discount websites such as Inky Deals
A Google search will also bring up plenty more 🙂
If you sign up to Creative Market they do a bundle of items for free each week – fonts are almost always included.
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Once you find a font you like
Click the download button on the website where you’ve found the font
If the file does not automatically pop up on your computer after downloading
Go to the downloads folder of your computer and search the font name
Then double click on the folder containing the font file
Sometimes the font designer will give you various options e.g. italics, bold or normal font files.
Double left click on each font style that you wish to install and press ‘install’.
You’ve just installed a font!
(when the ‘install’ button no longer becomes clickable i.e. it’s greyed out’ – that means the font has now been installed on your computer). You can now close that pop-up window.
To use the font, you may need to restart Microsoft word or other program that you’re using. Then just choose the font from the font menu like you would with any other font installed on your computer:
Note that if you have multiple computers, you’ll unfortunately need to download the font to each computer, or save the font files to a USB or external/portable hard drive and transfer them to the other computer or laptop.
Warning: downloading fonts is extremely addictive! Raise your hand if you’re a font addict? Yep, me too. The number of times I go searching for a type of font and end up downloading dozens and experimenting to see which I like best is far too often! You’ll probably end up with hundreds (or even thousands!) of fonts.
Experimenting with fonts
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog is a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet so it’s a great phrase for see how letters look when using a font. I use headings in a Microsoft Word document then press CTRL and F to bring up the navigation pane on the left menu. I can then can search using these headings by section. For example I sort fonts into the following sections: sans serif (simple) fonts, cursive fonts, credit required, personal use only and favorite fonts. I also keep a section for fonts I’ve used in certain products (and sometimes I also record the font site and font size if I’m likely to forget). Think of it as kind of a font brand style guide of sorts.
When I’m designing a new product I like to compare various font styles, I just copy and paste the phrase The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog then change the font style like this:
Having the fonts side by side allows me to easily choose between them!
On Canva and Picmonkey’s paid pricing plans you can use any font installed on your computer, otherwise you’ll have to choose from the font options they have available (which is still plenty!)
What font is that?
Have you seen a pretty font used on an invite, a printable, logo etc. and wondered how to find it and install it on your computer? Try tools such as WhatTheFont or WhatFontIs. Both programs allow you to upload an image with a font you like and it will try and recognize what the name of the font is.
I hope you found this post helpful! If you have any other font websites you <3 let me know in the comments, I’m always on the look-out for a pretty font 🙂
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