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Oh hi. If you're new here, you might not know about my obsession with fonts. Ever since my years in art school, an embarrassingly long time ago, I have loved type. I used to flip through the printed and bound font book we kept behind the counter at Kinko's. It would take me hours to find the perfect font for my reports in school, and I was always sure to have the most interesting type on my book reports.
I've done many posts on fonts in the past, from Harry Potter fonts to Halloween and Geek themed collections. I tested a whole bunch of script fonts on my Glowforge laser cutter, to see which ones work well for craft cutters at different sizes.
While sites like dafont.com are great for lots of free downloadable fonts, there are definite advantages to buying commercial fonts. Legally, you'll get a license allowing you to make money off the font, including for logo design and craft projects. Content-wise, paid fonts are often higher quality than you'll get from free designers. One thing that really helps demonstrate a high-quality font is if it has a selection of alternate characters.
There are ligatures, which is where common letter combinations are replaced with a new character to improve its design in that specific context, and then there are swash alternates. These are ways that you can add a custom flourish to your typography, to put emphasis on specific letters in the words that you're using.
This collection is made up of fonts that have a selection of alternate characters and ligatures.
Swash Font Download Links:
Adorn Pomander | Samantha Script Upright | Vondey Holiday | Amastery Script
Orchid Key | Beloved Sans | Adorn Bouquet | Ayla Script | Hummingbird
Modish | Kite Script | Rigoletto | Premier Script | Patronia
Several of these fonts have multiple alternates, so that you can create a totally personalized look with your type. Below, I've created an example chart that overuses swashes (Seriously, don't do this!) but will show you the difference between the standard fonts on the left, and just some of the swashes that are available on the right.
If you click through to each of the font's landing pages, you'll see additional (gorgeous!) examples of these typefaces, so make sure you take a look and see the capabilities of these amazing typefaces.
Also, as long as you're poking around FontBundles.net, be sure to grab this week's freebies! (Lots of those have alternate character swashes too!)
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