The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

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Paid Review: Urban Fonts

Posted on February 27, 2007.

Disclaimer: This is a paid review.

Urban Fonts is a website for free and commercial fonts and dingbats. I have used this site in the past and I'm happy to write a review for it now.

The first thing I like about Urban Fonts is the site design. The colors, typography, and organization throughout make for very easy reading and browsing. I like the front page sections, with the featured fonts, browsing links, and excerpts from the blog. I think the "top searches" section is probably too loaded, and it flows right out of its box when the text is enlarged. I think I would cut the number of links there in half.

Deeper into the site, I like the separation of fonts and dingbats, and I like the breadcrumbs on the sub-pages. In the individual font pages, I like how you can view the full table of characters, modify the sample text, and even modify the sample colors.

I like the sections for new fonts, top 100, and webmaster favorites; those are must-haves for any font site. The forum is cool too; I was surprised when I realized that users can post there without an account. As for the blog, the articles are actually very interesting, and a lot better than the usual freebie-site-blogs that post "look here, we just uploaded these fonts" kinds of entries. There aren't too many posts so far but the best one yet would be Typography 101. Oh, and there's a search feature, which allows you to filter by free and commercial fonts.

In the end, the only thing I don't like about Urban Fonts is the advertisements… some of them are very annoying animated ads. I think if they could get rid of the "hit 3 ducks and win a PS3" type ads, they would be better off. Besides, who wants a PS3 anyway? I say, gimme the 3 ducks instead. Still, I can't argue with anyone trying to monetize a site… that would make me a hypocrite :)

Anyway, enough pithy commentary. I like Urban Fonts a lot and I recommend it as a great place to look for fonts.

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2 Comments

  1. kramtark on February 27, 2007

    yawn

    Note to self: Don't read paid reviews.

    I agree, though, Urban Fonts is really slick. Especially because I can't see any advertisements thanks to Ad Block Plus.

  2. Christian Montoya on February 27, 2007

    Ha… I would probably use that too if I didn't need to see those ads in order to actually complain about them! I've always thought that if I don't like the ads on a site, I'll just stop visiting that site anyway.

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