Urban Fonts - Free and commercial fonts

January 12, 2007 | Paid Reviews

Urban Fonts is a free font download site and they recently tasked me with writing a (paid) review for them.

When it comes to fonts I already have a favourite website which I normally use for my own font finding needs . It has everything I need, vast amounts of free fonts to download, the ability to preview fonts, including changing the font preview text. Vast numbers of categories and a decent search engine to speed things up. I didn’t think anything would replace it… now I’m not so sure.

Urban Fonts has everything my favourite site has, along with a bunch of other stuff. Urban Fonts includes tags, for sorting the fonts, has a blog with articles about fonts and typography (articles that are actually useful/ interesting).

In terms of looking for fonts everything you need is there. The previews of the fonts are great - if you mouse over the font preview image you get a view of the entire alphabet in that font.

All this talk of free fonts does get in the way of the paid fonts though, clearly they want people to visit so are pushing the free font angle but there are times when you need to pay for a font (and they need to make money) so this is covered too.

Talking about making money, the site does have Google ads (on internal pages only), and they aren’t particularly intrusive at all, and since the site only talks about font related things the ads are totally relevant so not a bad thing at all.

Things I would change

There are a few superfluous features. I don’t care what their favourite fonts/ top 100 fonts are since they rarely help me when I am trying to find something specific. I also don’t see why you would have both a top 100 and a favourite since I would have thought they are essentially the same thing - maybe just removing one of them would help.

I feel it would be helpful to have an archive and/ or search for the blog and articles, and to tell the truth I can’t see why there is a separate articles section… they should be made part of the blog shouldn’t they?

I also wonder if it would be helpful to have an rss feed on the new fonts page, so that people who are interested can see when new fonts are added.

Lastly it would be nice if there was a way to bookmark my favourite font (using cookies, no logins please), or see a list of recently viewed fonts (again no logins thanks very much). These are nice features that would are not necessary but make the viewing experience that little bit nicer (we do something similar on miniclip.com and it works quite well).

Conclusion

I was very pleasantly surprised by Urban Fonts and will certainly be taking a look the next time I want to get some free fonts for whatever I might be cooking up.

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