My Type of Music Special:
Rocking FontFont’s Free Fonts

The upcoming episode of My Type of Music is delayed due to our recent Amazon EC2 cloud woes. To tide you over until I have gathered all the album covers and commented on them I invite you all to participate in the Rocking FontFont’s Free Fonts contest. One of the cool aspects of the FontFont library is that – besides being the home for some of the most popular versatile, often expansive text families – it was never afraid to take risks and foster imagination and experimentation. Amongst its releases are some daring designs, some of them very much children of their time. Inevitably these specific typefaces grew out of fashion. This is why FontFont has retired 24 families from the regular library, converted them to OpenType, and are now offering them at no cost. As a token of respect for the creativity of their designers the fonts are however still bound by a EULA.

This is the list of FontFonts that have become available for free:

• FF Baukasten (1995) by Alessio Leonardi
• FF Chelsea (1994) by Frank Heine
• FF Dig, FF Dog, FF Hip (1991, 1994) by Paul Sych
• FF Double Dutch (1992) by Marianne van Ham
• FF DuMoore (1992) by Dung van Meerbeeck
• FF Ekttor (1994) by Fabian Rottke
• FF FancyWriting (1996) by Timothy Donaldson
• FF Flèches (1993) by Pierre di Sciullo
• FF Jacque (1991) by Max Kisman
• FF Koko (1998) by Kai Zimmermann
• FF Motter Festival (2000) by Othmar Motter
• FF Murphy (1995) by Fedor Hüneke
• FF Ottofont (2001) by Barbara Klunder
• FF Peecol + FF Peecol Pocket (1998) by Steffen Sauerteig & Kai Vermehr
• FF Penguin (1995) by Nick Cooke
• FF Pullman (1997) by Johannes Erler
• FF Readout (1999) by Steffen Sauerteig
• FF Revolver (1993) by Rian Hughes
• FF Singer (1995) by Matthias Thiesen
• FF Spontan (1991) by Manfred Klein
• FF Steel (1995) by Fabrizio Schiavi
• FF SubVario SubMono (incl. FF Screen Logger) (1998) by Kai Vermehr
• FF Trombo (1995) by Andreas Jung
• FF Tronic (2003) by Hyun Cho
• FF Yokkmokk (incl. FF Yakkmakk) (1993)

Submission by Michael Smith

To announce this change in policy FontFont is organising the terrific Rocking FontFont’s Free Fonts contest.

Embodying the somewhat nostalgic spirit of these font families, try your hand at redesigning an album cover using at least one of the free FontFonts. Although many of these fonts conjure up the heyday of the grunge-era, your album can be from any time period – pick from the range of Bieber to Bach – or create an album you wish existed.

Submissions should be uploaded to FontShop’s Flickr Group Rocking FontFont’s Free Fonts by 11:59 PM (PDT) on Sunday, May 1. If you do not have a Flickr account you may email your submissions to moc.pohstnofnull@tsetnoc. Only three submissions per designer please (if you submit more than three, only the first three chronologically will be entered). On Tuesday, May 3, voting will be opened to the public via a survey link on the FontShop.com blog, Twitter, and Facebook pages. Voting will close at 11:59 PM (PST) on Sunday, May 8.

The winner will be announced on Monday, May 9 and will receive a $500 credit toward FontFonts on FontShop.com.

Tags: album covers, contest, free font