Velvetyne — free typefaces with a credit requirement people miss

• Velvetyne

  This page

  PricingVelvetyne leads

  • No cost at all, for personal and commercial work alike — there is no paid tier for using the typefaces
  • Voluntary donations support the collective but buy no additional rights, and do not remove the credit requirement
  • Paid work exists, but as custom typeface commissions rather than as font licences you buy off a page
  • Workshops and the collective’s book are separate paid activities, not access to the catalogue

• Google Fonts

  PricingVelvetyne leads

  • Free to use, with most families under licences that require no attribution and no payment
  • No paid tier and no account needed; the library is funded by the platform, not by font licensing
  • The cost you may pay is indirect — your site loads assets from their servers unless you self-host, which is where the European privacy issue arises

• Fontshare

  PricingVelvetyne leads

  • Free for commercial use, with no attribution requirement and no paid tier
  • Funded by the type house behind it as a showcase, so the catalogue is a curated shop window rather than a complete archive
  • Free specifically means free to use: modifying and redistributing the files is not part of what you get

• Adobe Fonts

  PricingVelvetyne leads

  • No separate font price — access is bundled with a Creative Cloud subscription
  • Licensing is tied to the subscription: cancelling means the fonts are no longer licensed, including for projects you may still be maintaining
  • Individual families can sometimes be bought outright from the foundry instead, which is the route to escape the subscription tie

1. Velvetyne — official site
2. Velvetyne — typeface catalogue
3. Velvetyne — FAQ and licensing
4. Velvetyne — custom typeface work
5. Google Fonts — official site
6. Fontshare — official site
7. Adobe Fonts — official site

Free tier

Yes

Pricing summary

There is no price list, which is the easy part, and there is no paid tier that unlocks anything extra, which is worth stating plainly because it is unusual. The collective funds itself through donations, the sale of its book, paid workshops and commissioned custom typeface work, and none of those change what you are permitted to do with the fonts. Paying does not make you a customer with a licence agreement; it supports the project. Which means the cost of using a Velvetyne typeface is not financial and is better described as an obligation, and there are two of them. The first is attribution: you credit the type designer and the foundry wherever the font is used. The second only bites if you modify something — the licence is copyleft, so a typeface you adapt must be released under the same licence as the original, which rules out taking one into a closed product. Neither is unreasonable and both are knowable in advance, which is more than can be said for a lot of free-font situations. Two details are worth holding on to because they resolve the cases people actually worry about. Where on-object credit is genuinely impossible — a logotype, small print on merchandise, a surface with no room — the foundry permits use without it, on the condition that the font name, its designer and the foundry are credited wherever you publish images of the work: the product page, a portfolio, a social post. That is a practical permission most free sources do not spell out. And a donation does not exempt you from crediting — the FAQ says so directly, which is worth knowing before paying in the belief that it buys you out of the requirement. For anything beyond the catalogue, custody work and workshops are priced on enquiry, and those are ordinary commercial arrangements rather than part of the licence.

Reviewed on 19 September 2026 · Velvetyne — FAQ and licensing

• A catalogue of libre typefaces you can use commercially at no cost

  Every typeface is libre and open source, which the foundry defines concretely: you may use them, modify them, redistribute them and redistribute modified versions, and the permission extends to commercial work. That is a broader grant than most free font sources offer — a great many free faces are free only for personal use, or free to use but not to alter, and the difference is invisible until a project is already designed around one.

• Display and experimental faces rather than text workhorses

  The catalogue skews toward faces with a strong voice — heavy, geometric, strange, sometimes deliberately awkward — which is exactly what you want for a headline, a poster, an album cover or a brand mark, and exactly what you do not want for a paragraph. Going in expecting a neutral text family will lead to disappointment; going in looking for a face that carries an opinion will not. Check the character set and weight range of a specific typeface before committing the layout to it.

• Modification is permitted, and encouraged

  Because the licence allows changes, you can add the glyphs your language or your layout needs, adjust a detail that is not working, or extend a face into a weight it does not ship with. The foundry asks that you send improvements back, which is a genuine invitation rather than a formality — several published typefaces have grown this way. The condition is that your modified version is released under the same licence, so the freedom to adapt comes with an obligation to keep the result open.

• A credit requirement with a practical exception

  Attribution is required: the designer and the foundry get credited. For work where on-object credit is impossible, the foundry allows use without it provided the credit appears wherever images of the work are published. This resolves the two situations that usually make designers avoid free fonts — a logotype with nowhere to put a line of type, and merchandise with no space for provenance — without abandoning the principle.

• Self-hosted files with no runtime dependency

  You download the fonts and serve them from your own site or bundle them into the project. Nothing calls out to a licensing server, no account exists, and no third party sees your visitors as a consequence of your typography. For anyone who has had to answer where a page’s assets come from, or who works under a data-protection regime, that is a material advantage over a hosted library.

• Collective authorship rather than a foundry catalogue

  This is an association and collective working through workshops, public projects and collaborations, and the typefaces come out of that practice rather than out of a commercial brief. The consequence is a catalogue with a recognisable sensibility and a fair amount of variance in polish between individual faces — which is honest about what it is, and worth knowing before you assume every typeface has been through the same production process.

• Commissioned type design and workshops

  Beyond the free catalogue the collective takes on custom typeface work and runs workshops on typography and typeface creation. That makes it a source for something bespoke when an existing face will not do — useful if you need a mark that is genuinely yours and are prepared to commission it rather than pick it.

1. 1

   Read the licence before you art-direct, not after the client approves

   The single most expensive mistake in this category is designing a full identity around a typeface and discovering the terms afterwards. Here the terms are short and unambiguous, and two of them are consequential: attribution is required, and modification carries a copyleft condition. Settle those with whoever owns the brand before the face is baked into a logo, a sign, a product or a deck that will be hard to change.

2. 2

   Check the character set against the actual copy

   Display-led libre typefaces vary in how complete they are, and a face that looks magnificent with three words may fall apart on an accent, a currency symbol, an em dash or a language you did not plan for. Set a real sample from the project — the longest headline, the awkward proper noun, the accented characters — rather than a specimen line, and if something is missing, remember that you are permitted to add it.

3. 3

   Decide the credit placement early and design it in

   If attribution is required, it should be a deliberate part of the layout rather than a line crammed in at the end. In a website, a colophon or a credits page handles it gracefully. In print, a masthead or a credits panel does the same. Where the work genuinely has no room — the logotype case — the obligation moves to wherever you publish images of the work, so plan the caption, the portfolio entry and the social post as the credit surface.

4. 4

   Keep the licence with the files, in the project, under version control

   A self-hosted font with no accompanying licence text is a future problem: the next person to touch the project cannot tell what is permitted, and a rebrand or an audit will stall while someone tries to reconstruct the terms. Drop the licence file into the same directory as the font files and let it travel with the repository. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a font that can be reused and one that has to be replaced.

5. 5

   Think before you modify, and think about who gets the result

   Adapting a face is permitted and the foundry welcomes it, but the copyleft condition means your version has to be released under the same licence. That is fine for an open project and awkward for a client who assumed the derivatives were proprietary. If the customisation is really a one-off visual adjustment rather than a reusable typeface, ask whether the change needs to happen in the font at all rather than in the layout.

6. 6

   Do not use a display face for body copy, however tempting

   The most common way a libre typeface gets blamed for a bad result is being set at 11 pixels. These are faces with strong personalities and limited ranges, and personality at headline size becomes noise at paragraph size. Pair the display face with a neutral, dependable text family and let each do the job it was drawn for — which also usually resolves the attribution question, because the licensed text family carries its own terms and the libre face is only used where credit is easy to place.

• Designers working on projects with no type budget

  A real font budget is one of the first things to go on a small project, and the usual consequence is that the work is set in whatever is already installed and looks like everyone else’s. A libre catalogue with genuine character is the way out: you keep the distinctive face, you spend nothing, and you take on an attribution obligation instead of a licence fee, which for most projects is a trade worth making.

• Anyone who needs to adapt a typeface rather than just set it

  Adding missing glyphs, extending a weight range, softening a shape, or building a custom variant from a base drawn by someone else is explicitly permitted here — and asked for. Most free font sources either forbid modification or are silent on it, which leaves you stuck or improvising. This is one of the few places where the answer to "can I change this?" is yes, with a licence attached rather than a lawyer.

• Editorial, cultural, music and independent brand work

  The catalogue is at its best where a voice matters more than neutrality: a poster, an album sleeve, a zine, a festival identity, a small brand with a point of view. These are also the contexts where an attribution line is easy to place and where the client is unlikely to have a policy against it, so the main friction of the licence simply does not arise.

• Designers who need a face no one else is using

  The default free libraries are so widely deployed that their faces have become visual shorthand for "made quickly". A smaller catalogue means a lower chance that your client’s competitor used the same typeface last month, which matters more than it sounds for brand work — distinctiveness is most of what a brand mark is for, and it cannot be borrowed from a library that everyone is already using.

• Teams that must be able to account for their assets

  Self-hosted files, no account, no runtime dependency on a third party, and a licence short enough to read and attach. For a team that has to answer where a page’s assets come from — under a data-protection regime, a security review, or a client’s procurement process — this is a noticeably easier position to defend than a hosted font service that transmits visitor requests to someone else’s server.

• Educators and students

  Free for commercial work means free for coursework and portfolios without the usual nagging restriction that free fonts so often attach to educational use. Being able to take a typeface apart and inspect how it was built is also a much better way to learn type than looking at one — and this is one of the few licences that lets you do it without asking.

Libre, and specifically defined that way

The foundry states that all hosted typefaces are libre and open source, and spells out what that means: the right to use, modify, redistribute and redistribute modified versions, for personal and commercial work alike. That is a real open licence rather than the much weaker "free for personal use" that many free font sites use. If you need to change the terms into a legally recognised instrument for a contract, check the specific licence file shipped with the individual typeface, because the collective can and does use different named licences across the catalogue.

Attribution is required, and a donation does not remove it

Crediting the type designer and the foundry is an obligation, not a courtesy, and the FAQ states directly that making a donation does not exempt you from it. This is the term most likely to surprise someone, both because the obligation is easy to overlook and because the opposite assumption — that paying resolves it — is intuitive and wrong. Budget the credit as part of the brief rather than treating it as an optional nicety.

The logo and merchandise exception, stated precisely

Where crediting on the object itself is not feasible — a logotype, small print, promotional material — the foundry permits use without on-object credit, provided the font name, the designer and the foundry are credited wherever photographs of the work are published: the product page, a portfolio, a social post. It is a generous and practical exception, and it is conditional rather than automatic, so it needs to be honoured in the publishing handle as well as the file.

Copyleft on modification, which is the term that constrains products

If you modify a typeface, you must redistribute your version under the same licence as the original. In practice this rules out taking a Velvetyne face, adapting it, and shipping the derivative inside a closed or proprietary product. For an open project or an identity that can carry a libre licence, it is no obstacle at all. Read it as the boundary of what the free permission covers rather than as a restriction on using the fonts in commercial work, which is unrestricted.

Catalogue scale and coverage vary by face

This is a small catalogue by the standards of a general purpose font library, and the individual typefaces are not uniform: some are complete families, some are single weight display faces, some are conceptual pieces with deliberately limited character sets. There is no guarantee of a common glyph coverage or OpenType feature set across the collection. Check the specimen and the character set of anything you intend to build on.

What it is not

It is not a commercial foundry with a support contract, an indemnity or anyone contractually accountable for a rendering defect. It is not a broad text-face library, so it will not cover a long-form typographic system on its own. It does not offer a hosted font service, so you cannot link to a CDN and skip handling files. And the free permission does not extend to modifying a typeface and releasing it under a proprietary licence, which is the one place the openness stops.