7 Latest Typography Tools for Freelance Designers

7 Latest Typography Tools for Freelance Designers

Freelancing career means doing annoying little jobs all by yourself, so many of them that at times it becomes difficult to concentrate on the core work. Freelance designers are no exception here; it’s a wonder how we find any time for actual designing work. You will always not spend all your time designing; there are other important demands too.

However, as we have often said before, content is the core of a web design project and as a freelance designer, you should also adopt a content first approach for your project and assignments. That’s why designing the right typography for your website becomes even more essential.

Luckily, there are several ranges of tools available to help you complete your job quickly and efficiently. New for 2018, these typography tools for freelance designers will definitely return a bit of sparkle in your typography skills.

“Typography is not just the font you use for website content, but it is also about the text style, appearance and arrangement. The size of the text, the number of words per page, the style such as italics, bold, underlined and colour also matter.”

Best Typography Tools for Freelance Designers for 2018

1. Fontface Ninja – Select Font from Your Favourite Website

Ever likeda website in particular and contemplated which font it has used? Yes? Well then you may get your answers from Fontface Ninja. Fontface Ninja is a free of cost browser extension that lets designers to search, try and buy fonts used on popular websites.

All you have to do is install the extension and select the icon. Once selected you can hover over a web font and inspect its name, line height, size and other style specifications.

If you want to know whether a particular font will for work you, click on the font in the drop-drown menu and type it on the overlaid box to see its compatibility.

2. Prototypo – Create Bepsoke Fonts Using 3 Basic Typefaces

Prototypo is one of the easiest ways to create personalised fonts for your website design projects. The tool generally provides three basic typefaces, namely, Prototype Fell, Prototype Grotesk and Prototype Elzevir.

With only these three typefaces, you can develop more than 1000 fonts using several permutations and combinations by changing 20 parameters. Changes can be made in thickness, height properties, defining different styles, fine tuning the serifs, apertures and roundness.

Once you have done the modification save it as a file extension as .otf file and use on websites and desktops.

There’s a free version with limited features. If you want to enjoy all of its features, you can buy a plan (starts at $15/month).

3. Best Google Fonts – Top Great Google Fonts

Google Fonts is one of the best places to explore free fonts. The tool has more than 800 fonts that can be used by anyone for any web design project, be it commercial or personal.

But, how will you know if the font selected by you is best and most popular or not? Amongst 800 amazing fonts, finding the most renowned one is a bit tricky. So, this Great Tool can make your search process simpler.

Here, you can search fonts according to visual categories instead of terms (like times new roman, sans-serif and serif). Use the filter button in the menu to get a clearer idea. Once you have chosen a font, tap its name, and the site will redirect you to its page on Google Fonts.

4. IDEO Font Map – Generate Uncommon and Unusual Font Pairing Using AI

Tired of using the same combination of fonts for your freelance web design projects? Not anymore, as IDEO Font Map is here to help you to generate original and uncommon fonts.

The concept of the tool is very simple: it basically acts as an interactive map of more than 750 fonts that use artificial intelligence to produce new relationships across the fonts.

You will only be able to grasp the entire process once you play around with it. So, unless you give it a try, it will sound obtuse to you.

5. Fontjoy – A Sibling of IDEO Font Map, Yet Unique in its Features

Just like its elder sibling IDEO Font Map, Fontjoy is yet another insightful tool to find unusual, new and classy font pairings. If you want to choose similar or contrasting fonts for your selected text, Fontjoy allows you to do so.

Created by a designer and engineer, Jack Qlao, the tool helps you to generate similar or quite contrasting list of fonts for your favoured font. All you have to do is use the slider at the top of the site, select the font of your choice, click the “Generate” button and get instant matches.

You can ‘Lock’ fonts that you want to keep or use ‘Edit’ for manual selection of fonts. You can also edit the preformatted text and replace it with your copied text or company name for evaluation.

6. F37 Foundry – Test Typefaces within Your Web Browser

If you want to see how well a particular typeface suits your web site or browser, without jumping to and fro, use the F37 Foundry tool. The Foundry, launched by Rick Banks along with digital designer and developers, Francis Smith and Tom Duncalf in Feb 2017, is Adobe illustrator inspired tool.

It allows users to test a particular typeface in an intuitive and sophisticated way within their web browser.  Things you can do with this tool are immense – you can move text, rotate text as well as resize them. You can also do the typography tweaking bit such as kerning, tracking, colouring and leading.

7. Calligraphr

Not liking any fonts up on the internet? If you cannot find the right font, you have the option of creating your own font. Calligraphr is an interesting and amazing tool, developed by Maklabu in Feb 2017 that allows you to convert your own handwritings into fully functional vector fonts.

How does it work? The tool comes with downloadable templates. Use them to write handwritten letters and wait for Calligraphr to translate it into fonts.

Using the software features you can further edit the fonts and perfect it. You can also create your own ligatures. Plans start at $8 per months for freelance designers.