FontBay

FontBay is a free font library with thousands of fonts to discover and download. Visitors preview fonts instantly without an account, browse by category and popularity, and find font pairing ideas on the blog.

Free font sites are everywhere, and most of them make you sign up, click through ads or download a file before you can see what a font actually looks like. FontBay set out to fix that: thousands of free fonts, instant previews and no account.

A library that grows every day also needs strong browsing, by category, trend and popularity, and a reason for designers to come back.

I built FontBay as a custom PHP application with a Bootstrap front end and a light and dark mode. Visitors type their own text and see every font preview instantly, then browse by new, trending, popular or category, with no sign-up required to download.

A Font Pairing Spotlight and blog give designers ideas, such as Merriweather with Montserrat, and a weekly new-fonts roundup and monthly best-of lists, including Urdu and Nastaliq fonts, keep people returning and bring in search traffic.

Around the library sits a set of free design tools, a social media font generator, quote card maker, letter-spacing generator, logo and favicon maker and a colour contrast checker, which turn a font site into a small design toolkit.