Every now and again we take a look around, select “fresh” high-quality free fonts and present them to you in a brief overview. The choice is enormous, so the time you need to find them is usually the time you should be investing in your current projects. We search for them and we find them, so you don’t have to.

This month we are glad to present you Freebooter Script, Cora Basic Regular, Walkway and Karabine. Please read the license agreements carefully — they can change from time to time.

Thanks Justin for another Great post.

Read more from Justin after the jump…
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The folks over at Smashing Magazine always have some great examples of design that really inspires one to go out and design, only to realize that it comes out nothing like they planned. The above photo, for example, is one of many examples of some great experimental typography. This one stood out the most as it is very representative of the corporate, minimalist, feel of many ads i have come across lately in the advertising world.

Great, quirky use of a common phrase, with a slight twist that gives this a whole new meaning. Nice contrasting colors (green…..it’s so HOT right now) and you have a very powerful piece built solely on typography.

Click through to read the full article from 3point7designs.com

CSS has brought us many capabilities in terms of typography and the web, but we always seem to be limited to the same 4-5 typefaces over and over again. There is an inherant problem, if the font you specify isn’t on the viewers computer it won’t render in that font. So as designers and developers we end up selecting the ones that we can safely assume is available on most computers today. So most pages use Arial, Helvetica, or Georgia as their typefaces… and the world of the web remains slightly more bland.

But there are quite a few high quality typefaces that are available on most new computer systems and you can always fall back on the common ones. Of course there are options like creating images, dynamic headlines, and siFR… but all of these techniques increase load time and development time. There are plenty of good reasons to be strategic in the font choices rather than using additional technology. I am shocked at how rarely I see anyone taking advantage of these type options, so here is a quick and dirty list of fonts you should and could use in your desgns and stylesheets.

1. Palatino Linotype / Palatino

WINDOWS 97.09% / MAC 78.86%

This is a nice serif font that his pretty good support for both Mac and Windows based machines (97.09% of all windows machines have it, and 78.86% of mac’s). Yet very few people use it and instead default to georgia or times. As you can see it makes for great headlines, and I have used it with success as copy type as well. Worse case you can always default back to georgia, times, etc.

2. Tahoma

WINDOWS 96.09% / MAC 72.02%

I admit this is not one of my favorite fonts, but it does have many instances where it could be used effectively. It doesn’t seem to get used very often despite the fact that it could be an excellent copy font. Again there is always Arial or Helvetica if the machine doesn’t have Tahoma installed.

3. Impact

WINDOWS 95.85% / MAC 88.08%

Admittedly this font probably is overused in non-web related design. Since it is one of the “cooler” default fonts on most machines it tends to get a lot of use. Despite this fact there are plenty of good places to use it, and it works great for well… “impactfull” headlines.

4. Century Gothic

WINDOWS 85.44% / MAC 42.50%

This is a nice elegant font that was overused by graphic designers some time ago, but it has been locked away and shunned for some time now. It may almost be time to pull it back out of the tool chest. Not a huge percent of Mac systems come with it preinstalled, but most new ones do. Depending on your target audience this could be the perfect font to use. If you are worried about the low mac support you could always opt for Futura as well (which has very high mac support).

5. Arial Black

WINDOWS 97.73% / MAC 96.18%

Yup you don’t just have to use plain old Arial. Arial black is a nice bold font that could be perfect for headings, impacting headlines, and hell even a replacement for the Impact font mentioned above. I don’t know that I would use it for body text, but it is an option that should be realized in web typography.

6. Arial Narrow

WINDOWS 87.08% / MAC 91.01%

Arial again! We are not done yet, oh no. Much like arial black, arial narrow is a great font for headlines. Instead of the big bold in your face style of headlines you can use this typeface for more elegant subtle headlines. A nice change from the traditional arial, and can be used much like you would a condensed font.

7. Copperplate / Copperplate Gothic Light

WINDOWS 58.13% / MAC 85.85%

I will admit I hate this font, mostly because it is misused (and people will probably argue that it is not the fonts fault, but the designers). But there are times when it can be used effectively, and it has pretty good support on newer windows computers and most mac based computers. Most likely it will again be for headlines, larger headlines, as it is not terribly legible at small fonts especially when it isn’t properly aliased.

8. Gill Sans / Gill Sans MT

WINDOWS 43.09% / MAC 90.82%

No surprise I like this font. I think it works both in copy and in headlines, and it has fair support in both platforms. Anytime you use a font that has about 50% support rate you want to think about the next logical font to serve, but there are enough options specific to windows that would let you achieve the same typographic message with only subtle differences.