Open Source Fonts Are Love Letters to the Design Community

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Font families can sell for hundreds of dollars. Gotham, a popular typeface used by President Barack Obama’s campaign and many others, costs nearly $1,000 to license a complete set of 66 different styles. But The League of Moveable Type, gives all of its fonts away for free. What’s more, it makes them open source, so that other people can modify the fonts and make their own versions of them.

And people have. Raleway, designed by Matt McInerney and released in 2010, was expanded from a single weight into a family with nine weights, from “thin” to bold to “black,” each with matching italics, in 2012 by Pablo Impallari, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, and Igino Marini. It’s now one of the most popular font families on Google Fonts, a collection of free fonts hosted by the search giant.

[Source: WIRED]