Free Typefaces for Personal and Commercial Use
Made Somewhere shares three fantastic typefaces for personal and commercial use – Quilon, General Sans, and Panchang.
This week, we explore three typefaces that are free for personal and commercial use by The Indian Type Foundry: Quilon, General Sans, and Panchang. These are three fantastic free type options to use for your next personal or commercial project.
Quilon by Indian Type Foundry
To kick things off, let’s take a look at our first free typeface for personal and commercial use – Quilon. Quilon is a high-contrast sans serif family. It’s design features also transcend the centuries – elements of both 19th-century English grotesques and 1990s postmodernism are present in its letterforms. The family is an optimal selection for use in display typography. As the weights progress, their stroke contrast increases dramatically. Each font in the family includes 391 glyphs. “Quilon” is the previous name for Kollam, a city located in Kerala, India.
General Sans by Frode Helland
General Sans is a rationalist sans serif typeface. Its letterforms feel like the France of the 1950s; they are very orderly, but also a bit spritely. The letters’ apertures are very small, making the counter-forms in typeface feel like they are being completely enclosed within their surrounding characters. The General Sans family comes in twelve weights ranging from Extralight to Bold with complementary italics .
The lowercase letters’ ascenders rise up to the exact height of the tops of the capital letters. Each font has two versions for each numeral; the standard numerals are slightly smaller than that capital letters. The other numerals are substituted into all-caps text by the fonts’ case-sensitive OpenType feature. These alternate numerals are the same size as the capital letters.
General Sans’s fonts also have a full range of superior and inferior numerals for the better setting of fractions. Many of General Sans’s capital letters seem very geometric. For example, the ‘G’ does not have a spur at its bottom-right, and the tail of the ‘Q’ is a simple, vertical stroke. The lowercase ‘a’ in the General Sans fonts is double-storey, while the ‘g’ is single-storey. The ‘f’ and ’t’ are very wide. The dots on the ‘i’ and ‘j’ – as well as the fonts’ dot-based punctuation and diacritical marks – are circular. General Sans is an excellent selection for use in branding, or in other kinds of corporate identity design. It may also be put to good use in editorial designs for publications about contemporary lifestyle issues.
General Sans was designed by the Norwegian type designer Frode Helland for the Indian Type Foundry.
Panchang by Hitesh Malaviya and Barbara Bigosińska
Lastly, Ranging in weight from Light through ExtraBold, the Panchang family has six wide sans serif fonts on offer. The typeface features letters so wide that they are almost panoramic. The family supports all European languages written with the Latin script. Panchang’s lowercase letters have a tall x-height, and their ascenders are visibly taller than the capitals.
The design’s broad letterforms look very industrial on the whole. Most terminals end with horizontal and vertical strokes, giving them a clean and streamlined look. There are a few exceptions to keep texts from becoming too monotonous. For instance, the diagonal stroke endings on the ‘C’, ‘S’, ‘c’, ‘e’, ‘g’, ‘s’, ‘6’, and ‘9’. Additionally, you will find these on the top half of the ‘G’, ‘f’, and ‘2’, as well as on the bottom of the ‘J’, ‘j’, ‘t’, ‘y’, ‘5’ and part of the ‘3’. This allows it to take a wide stance, just like the rest of Panchang’s character set. A number of fine details stand out in the fonts: ‘a’ and the ‘g’ both take single-storey forms.
The typeface was designed by Hitesh Malaviya and Barbara Bigosińska.
Panchang by Hitesh Malaviya and Barbara Bigosińska
We hope you enjoyed Trending Typefaces and Type Styles 07 – Free Typefaces for Personal and Commercial Use. Additionally, you can see other fantastic options in our other posts – Trending Typefaces and Type Styles 02 and Trending Typefaces and Type Styles 06. Without a doubt, there will be more typefaces that will assist you with your next project!
*Made Somewhere has written this post to provide a personal admiration for these typefaces to help other designers. Lastly, we’re not paid or endorsed to write this post in any way.