Introducing Fontshare, a free fonts service making high-quality fonts accessible to all

The Indian Type Foundry (ITF) is delighted to announce the launch of Fontshare—a brand new free fonts service—making high-quality fonts accessible to all. We are on a mission to ensure everyone has the opportunity to use beautiful fonts in their designs for free. 

Fonts for free for good


For a number of years, ITF has been offering students, design institutions and other not-for-profit organisations all of its commercial fonts for free. Between 2014-2016, it released several open-source fonts, including the incredibly popular Poppins (which is used on millions of websites across the globe), Rajdhani, Khand, Hind and Teko, to name just a few. It has also invested a large proportion of its resources in developing fonts for languages that are rare or on the brink of extinction, even though this is not commercially profitable. 

The launch of Fontshare is an extension of this ideology, with an aim to go even further and help brands and individuals who do not have the budget but still want to access beautiful typography. Licensing commercial fonts for use on a large scale can be really, really expensive. Sometimes even bigger brands simply cannot afford them. To put it in context, out of every ten enquiries we receive at ITF for a corporate licence, seven of them don't go through because of the budget constraints. These brands are, therefore, then left with no choice but to use a font that is freely available on the internet.  


Raising the standard


Most of the free fonts that are available online are of poor quality and often have dubious origins. You can determine the quality of a typeface by examining the drawing of letters, spacing, kerning, OpenType features, character sets, language support, the availability of weights, italics and of newer font formats, such as variable fonts. 

Indeed, a large proportion of free fonts are ripped-off versions of proprietary fonts and do not have enough information about the creator, so there is always the threat of legal action being taken by the original owner. 

We always wanted to change this. Through many consequent years of hard work, we are now in a position to realise this vision and have decided to make 25% of our Latin fonts available to the public for free. We decided to launch a dedicated service, where we can curate fonts and continually improve their quality over time. From now on, every fourth Latin font family that we design at ITF will be shared on Fontshare for free. Although these fonts are not open-source and are still controlled by an ITF EULA, they’re 100% free for personal and commercial use. You can use them in any media, at any scale, and in any location worldwide. Using Fontshare fonts also means that you’re legally protected because no one else can claim ownership of these fonts. 


50 free fonts and counting


We're launching this service with 50 font families and will continue to add more fonts as ITF's retail library grows. Users can either access these fonts using our Fontshare API or download an offline kit that contains both Web and Desktop fonts. 

Fontshare does not make money. The entire service (fonts, website, development, hosting, servers, support etc.) is fully sponsored by ITF. And unlike other free services, Fontshare does not ask for, track or store any of the user's personal data. 

Why not check it out and start adorning your designs with beautiful free fonts. 

WWW.FONTSHARE.COM