I tend to use "font archive" or "license to print money" :-)

I'd go with "root of all evil"

I do not get it.

Sii: “license to print money”
Where is my cut? Some of my fonts are free on MyFonts and a few on DaFont.
Or do you mean, as in MS giving away tens of fonts with every Win or Office?

mmurray: “root of all evil”
Is giving fonts away for free evil?

Dafont is responsible for cluttering the world with some truly awful typefaces, free or not.

Is giving fonts away for evil free?

I mean they make a lot of money on the ad's. That's not to say they don't provide a service that people want. So not evil just good at making money.

Bless you, Dan. I feel much better under the collar :)

Free fonts = socialism = EVIL EVIL EVIL!

Er, yea, they're just free font sites. Some more curated than others. Dafont's useful to useless ratio is something like 1/1000

Damn commies with their destroyed/eroded fonts.

In all honesty, giving fonts away for free is a great and noble thing to do — if they are of quality. Free fonts from dafont are are overpriced.

> giving fonts away for free is a great and noble thing to do — if they are of quality

And if their creators have released them to the public domain ... and we know how many people like to work and not get paid for it.

DaFont is actually incredibly useful when I'm doing a personal (non-paying) job and need a display font to fit a specific era or style, like Art Deco, grunge, hand-drawn, etc. I can usually find something close enough to what I'm looking for, and then I can manually kern when I place it in Illustrator.

That said, I'm really tired of seeing people using Sketch Rockwell everywhere.

There is nothing wrong if someone wants to design a font for free. The problem is a lot of the fonts on sites like this tend to be blatant copies of proper type designers hard work. Yesterday Fontsmith had to contact the lawyers at Channel 4 regarding a rip off of the Channel 4 type face we designed for them. The font were removed, but it is hard to police stuff like this.

In a conversation yesterday, ad-libbing, I referred to it as a repository. FWIW.

Free fonts from dafont are are overpriced.

Too funny -- and true! (And I say this in spite of the fact that they have links to two of my FontStruct fonts. FontStructions are free, but they could have asked me beforehand if it was okay to list them on DaFont. *Sigh*...)

Doesn't FontSquirrel do a better job of it? http://www.fontsquirrel.com/faq

edit: it seems to be run by http://www.fonthead.com/

re: fontsquirrel and fonthead are both the product of type designer Ethan Dunham.

fonthead! I remember their old website, back in the early days of the World Wide Web. (That dates me, I know.)

dafont is very useful and contains much better typefaces that 99% of all the other free font websites; i'm using it quite often, when i'm in need of a very specific titling font for a packaging project (and i do packaging all year long) that doesn't require a perfect kerning. when i can't find what i need in quality foundries such as sudtipos or fontdiner, when hubert jocham is unavailable, dafont is very handy, even though full of problems (one of them being the big amount of ripoffs, even if they seem to be removed quite fast). to name dafont the 'root of all evil' is a bitter (some bad experience?) and rather stupid comment, in my opinion. I don't know fontsquirrel.

this being said, i second drdoc's comment on rockwell sketch :-)

dr