Five Free Fonts Make Back-to-School Time Fun and Frugal

19.08.2012
Back-to-school sales are cropping up everywhere, so it must be that time of year again. Say good-bye to summer and hello to learning with the following school-oriented fonts. All are either free or have a free demo available for personal use, so you can cross one thing off your list. From preschool through college, we have you covered.

(For links to all of these downloadable fonts in one convenient list, see our .)

Learn your ABCs with the cute from House of Lime. This TrueType font renders uppercase letters regardless of whether you type in all-caps or lowercase, and it has no punctuation (and therefore no apostrophe in the name of the font itself). Each glyph incorporates a picture that represents the letter. Standard beginning-sound images include an apple, a cat, a dog, a queen, a violin, and a xylophone; among the more-unusual ones are a ghost, a jack-in-a-box, a rainbow, and stars. Each one is humorously sketched--look for the elephant being chased up the letter E by a tiny mouse--and each image fits perfectly with its corresponding letter, also a sketched-style glyph.

A solid display font, Kids Alphabet needs to be quite big, at least 48-point, to show off all the detail. It's also unsuitable for anything longer than a short word or two since the kerning is irregular, thanks to frogs taking flying leaps, umbrellas catching errant raindrops, and zebras running out from behind the letter. Embedding is restricted in the free version. The commercial version, available for a fee, includes full embedding rights; contact House of Lime for information. For personal Web use, the license requires that you include a link back to House of Lime somewhere on your site. A Mac version is available as well.