I briefly mentioned in an article about design licenses that you will need to be sure to use commercial use fonts in all designs that you are selling. But, where can you find commercial use fonts?
Here are my favorite resources:
(Christine’s Pick!) Creative Market – Creative Market is an online marketplace where you can buy digital design goods to use in your personal or commercial projects. This includes fonts, and so much more. I highly recommend joining Creative Market, they send out freebies every Monday via email.
(Christine’s Pick!) Font Bundles – Font Bundles is a website that sells fonts in bundles. They stay on top of trends and their bundles are awesome! Read more about Font Bundles in this post.
Mighty Deals – Mighty Deals is a time limited deal site for designers. Items like fonts go on sale for a limited amount of time at a deeply discounted price. Mighty Deals is the place to go if you are looking to buy the popular Samantha font for only $17 instead of $75! Once you get to the site, type “Samantha” in the search box. If it isn’t on sale when you type it in, return to the site the following week and try again.
Creativa Fabrica – This newer site is a subscription service for font lovers. If you are newer to crafting with your Silhouette Cameo or Cricut, this might be a great option for you. For seasoned users, you are likely to have many of the fonts available. Learn more about Creative Fabrica in this post.
Font Squirrel – Font Squirrel is a font site that only lists commercial use fonts. Be careful with this site, as I’ve seen fonts that aren’t free for commercial use listed. Be sure to read the license included with the font for verification, but careful font seekers can find lots of freebies!
Google Fonts – Did you know that Google provides hundreds of open source fonts for free? Check out Google Fonts, and here’s a great tutorial from cnet.com on how to download them to your computer.
Dafont – Dafont is a popular font listing site, which contains fonts with various licenses. Here’s a quick trick to finding free, commercial use fonts: 1) Go to dafont.com, 2) Choose a category from the top menu. 3) Choose the dropdown menu “more options” 4) Check “Public domain” and “100% Free”, then click “Submit”.
A few quick notes:
User beware: Even if a font is listed as free for commercial use, it is in your best interest to verify the license terms when you download the font. The license information is generally located in the font download folder.
Advanced software: If you mainly design in Silhouette Studio, you’ll need to be cautious of fonts that are meant for use in advanced programs like Adobe Illustrator. Some fonts have fancy extras (like swashes, flourishes, alternate characters, or ligatures) that will not be accessible within Silhouette Studio. You’ll want to find fonts that are character mapped (PUA encoded), which means that users can access the extras using a character map on your computer and copy and paste them into Silhouette Studio. If the listing doesn’t specify whether or not you can access the extras through a character map, don’t hesitate to ask the seller. Learn more about fonts and how to use advanced features in these posts on Cutting for Business.
Timesaving: I’m a font junkie and have a few thousand fonts installed on my computer. Rather than scroll through each font each time I go to use one, I like to use Nexus Font Viewer (Windows) or Font Book (Mac). Both of these allow you to type a word or phrase and it will show you what the word or phrase looks like in all the fonts you have installed on your computer. If you’d rather not download a font viewer to your computer, check out wordmark.it which is an online font viewer. You type in your word in the box and click “Load Fonts”. The word is shown in all the fonts you have installed on your computer.
Looking for free commercial use cut files? You’ll definitely want to head over to this post.
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Love your posts! I began keeping track of my fonts when I started buying commercial. Unfortunately for me, I have many fonts that I had downloaded that were free for commercial use before I started separating them. Now those early fonts are mixed in with my computer fonts and I’m not sure which is which. Is there a way to tell the difference from fonts installed on the computer at purchase? Are these pre-installed fonts ok to use for commercial use?
Hi Cindy! Here’s a link with more information on pre-installed fonts – most still need licensed for commercial use: https://www.microsoft.com/typography/faq/faq11.htm. If you install NexusFont or use Fontbook (Mac), you can look up properties of the fonts easily which might help you sort them out. See this link: https://cuttingforbusiness.com/2016/01/26/organizing-fonts-with-nexus-font/
Hi Christine! Thank you for this wonderful informative site.
If I purchase the Samantha font from Mighty Deals am I allowed to create a cut file design “Mary Christmas” using the font and sell the cut file? This is just an example I am using. I do not understand when it is okay to use a font, for which you have purchased a commercial license, in a cut file design you want to sell compared to a physical item like a t-shirt with a word printed on it.
Thank you!
As long as you have commercial use rights and are not distributing the font, this would be okay.
Hi Christine,
I’m new to selling my crafts, and have been reading through your blog to learn more about commercial use fonts etc…. My question is, say on dafont.com, if the website says the font is 100% free for commercial use, that means you dont have to purchase a license to sell something using that font? But if it only says free for personal use, you must find the link to download it and buy the license for commercial use? Same goes for images found on the internet… even if it is a free download, you want to check it is free for commercial use before you could use it on a project to sell? Thanks in advance for helping the naive 🙂
Correct. This post should clear it up: https://cuttingforbusiness.com/2015/01/20/understanding-licenses-on-cutting-files-designs-and-fonts-and-organizing-them-too/
Christine, I’m kind of a font hoarder, so I have a ton of fonts and not all of them are commercial use or even appropriate for use in cut files. Is there a way to get Silhouette Studio to load only a certain set of fonts? I’m working on an iMac. Thanks!
No, there is not at this time.
I have an adobe cloud account which includes adobe fonts. It states that they can be used for commercial projects. It doesn’t say anything about SVG file. Can I assume that I would be within their licensing to creat files to sell? Thanks.
If it states that the fonts can be used for commercial use, you can use them commercially for SVG files.
Love this post! Can you recommend fonts that are easy to weed?
Non distressed script fonts are easiest to weed. While not my post, there is a great list here: https://naptimealt.com/favorite-script-fonts-for-vinyl-cutting-free-printable-stickers-and-cut-files/