Some folks collect shoes. Us designers? It’s fonts. As graphic designers, we tend to have a deep-seated obsession with typography. There’s nothing like an exquisite curve of an ampersand to get us to promptly whip out our business credit card. Always on the hunt for more fonts to add to our ever-growing collection (you can never have too many, right!?) it’s safe to say that us designers allocate a fair and justified chunk of our dollars to investing in our typography collection.

As type designer Jean-Baptiste Levee said, “Building a good font collection is like populating one’s wardrobe. It requires a balance between versatility and expressivity, everyday accessories, and special outfits for special occasions.”

So, without further ado, here are our favourite places to explore and collect new typefaces and fonts, both for work and for pleasure!

Oh, and we should mention that some of the links we include in this post are affiliate partners of ours. This means we could make a bit off of any purchase you make through our links.

You’ve most likely heard of this one, or stumbled upon it during a font search - perhaps you even found us there! Creative Market is one of the most popular websites out there for designers for creative assets. It’s a crowdsourced marketplace for so much more than just fonts. On Creative Marketplace, you can also purchase and download icons, graphics, illustrations, website templates, email templates, and more.

What’s even cooler about this site is that you’re supporting the work of individual creatives  from around the world! Anyone can upload their work to the marketplace.

We especially love the filter functionality. When searching for a font, you can search by “Category” or “Style” to begin to narrow your search.

This awesome resource is another  online marketplace for designers to upload and sell their work. You can easily filter by style, and they run great sales. YouWorkForThem has a really impressive list of clients including The New York Times, Apple, Buzzfeed, and Harvard University and has over 130,000 fonts to choose from.

If you subscribe to Adobe CC (Creative Cloud), Adobe Fonts is the most incredible, easy-to-use resource for adding fonts to your library. This service is included in your CC subscription! 
We love that we can browse their font library and simply toggle the “on” button to activate that font in all Adobe programs we use. It’s that easy. Plus, all commercial licensing is included with the CC subscription, so that’s one less thing we have to worry or think about!

This cutting-edge site features lots of fresh, new fonts and font families from some of the most talented independent designers and design foundries in the industry. This is a great place to shop if you’re looking for something a little bit edgy for your creative project.

MyFonts boasts an extensive collection of fonts to purchase and download. One thing to pay close attention to on this site are its special offers! Lots of promotions to be found here. You can search by designer name, type name, or foundry name. They also offer a really useful tool called “What the Font” where you can upload an image of a font you want to find or imitate and MyFonts will locate either the font itself or similar fonts.

This incredible resource is a bit different from the rest. Fontstand is a website AND an app that allows you to search and test fonts easily. The most awesome thing about Fontstand is that you can actually rent fonts from Fontstand first to try before making a purchase. You can even rent fonts by the month, which can make it super affordable for some premium typefaces and ideal if rather than committing to investing in a whole typeface, you wanted to simply use a font for something like a social media post. Plus, if you’ve rented a font for more than 12 months, it’s yours to use forever. This was a game-changer for us when we discovered it. It has a really impressive selection of premium fonts, with some of our favourites being Canela and Elaine.

Fontesk is an amazing resource for designers on a tight budget, or for those of us who want to trial loads of different fonts without spending much. Fontesk curates a super beautiful collection of some of the best free fonts on the web! It has a handy search option to show ‘free for commercial use’ so that you can have peace of mind using a font for your business or client project.

Like everything Google makes, this resource is impressive and super powerful. The biggest pro to this site is its accessibility - all fonts are uploaded under an open-source license, so anyone is free to use them for personal or commercial purposes. A fun fact - Google prides itself on sending you the most compressed file size possible for its fonts so that any site you use them on will run that much faster!

Envato is yet another marketplace with a wide variety of fonts by independent font creators. One really cool thing to keep in mind - their monthly subscription service called “Envato Elements” is less than $20/month. When you subscribe to that, you instantly have access to over 7,000 fonts. Any designer knows that this tradeoff is worth every penny!

Like we mentioned at the beginning of this post, building your “font wardrobe” should be a fun, lifelong, ever-evolving process. With some timeless investment pieces added in for good measure! We hope these resources help equip you to grow your font collection so you can serve your clients creatively and confidently.