Free Halloween Display Fonts
A review of free Halloween display fonts that can be used in the classroom for posters, flyers, handouts, and instructional material. I came reviewing five free and available for commercial use fonts. The fonts come from various sources. The fonts in this review can be used for free and non-free products and services.
In a previous post on [Halloween display fonts], I looked at five display fonts that were not free. In all fairness, I thought it would be important for me to review some free Halloween display fonts. There are plenty of fonts available on sites all over the Internet. I’ve chosen four sites that have a nice selection and have been around for a while.
The fonts on these sites are mostly for personal use. This means you cannot use the fonts for products you intend to sell. The posters I created in the previous post were created with purchased fonts for commercial use. I have full rights to create and sell content with those fonts. That is not the case with some of the fonts I will be reviewing in this post.
As educators, we do have a little bit of wiggle room. The products we create for the classroom are not for sale. The products we create are for instructional content and we tend to dispose of them once the year is over and create new content the following year. The fonts are installed on your computer so you can create and print posters, flyers, and handouts. As educators, we are definitely not profiting from the content we create. Unless you create content for sale on sites like Teachers Pay Teachers. This is the reason I purchase my fonts and other content for this blog. In general, I would stick to using “Free for Personal” use fonts on products you want to create for yourself.
I will focus on fonts that are free and available for use in commercial products. This eliminates any concerns you and I might have about the fonts reviewed in this post. We want to honor the rights of the creators of content like the fonts I will review.
Free fonts are free for personal use and commercial use. This is not always the case and you need to verify information from the link before using the font.
Hew! That’s a lot about font use and copyright. Not what I wanted to focus on, but it is important that you know these things. This is something I regularly touch on with students and teachers during professional development and class instruction. Fonts are intellectual property created by someone.
If you make a mistake, nothing serious happens. You usually get an email or a letter requesting that you stop using the font. Stop using the font, apologize and move on.
Download the font and install it on your computer. The installation is fairly simple. I have instructions for installing fonts on Windows and Mac computers. Use the link below to go through those instructions.
Daemonesque
Daemonesque is a free font found on 1001freefonts.com. The site, 1001freefonts.com, has plenty of free and “free for personal” use fonts. Daemonesque is a nice font and is free without limitations at the time I wrote and posted this article. The font is created by Gem Fonts.
I received an error warning about the font during the installation. The Font Book app on Mac verifies the integrity of font files so they work properly. The warning was minor. It is related to the kern table, structure, and contents. This is an advanced option in typography you are not likely to encounter when using the display for simple products like posters. The font will work just fine. I didn’t encounter any problems when installing the font on Windows 10 or 11.
I am using the same poster format from the previous post so you can compare the fonts.
Zombie Holocaust
Zombie Holocaust is a free font with commercial use rights. The font is available from 1001fonts.com. The font was created by Sinister Fonts. This font has lots of crocked lines and angles. Works great on banners and posters.
Blackwood Castle
Blackwood Castle is a free font with commercial use rights. This font is also from 1001fonts.com. Typographer Mediengestaltung makes this font. I like it because it has an old-time font feel. It reminds me of the font used in those old Dracula and Vincent Price movies.
October Crow
October Crow is available front from dafont.com. The font was created by Sinister Fonts.
The fonts on dafont.com are mostly free for personal use and demo fonts. Demo fonts contain only a few of the characters available in the full set. They are meant to entice you into buying the full set of fonts. This is equivalent to purchasing the license for commercial use. This isn’t always the case and you need to verify when purchasing or making a donation to the designer.
A Lolita Scorned
A Lolita Scorned is free for personal and commercial use. The font is available on fontspace.com. The font creator is AngeliQ.
I like this font because it is slightly more stylish than the others. It adds a little more elegance to our design.
There you have it. Five free Halloween fonts from four font services. You might have noticed that none of these fonts included dingbats. Dingbats take a little more work and are popular. Creators tend to focus on the font and create dingbats to accompany the font when they would add value.
I hope you found this useful. For your convenience, the links to all the resources and fonts are summarized below.
Halloween display fonts
The holidays are always a great time to create fun content. One of the ways to create fun content is to use fun fonts. At one time we were stuck with the fonts installed on our computers. Fonts were hard to find and designer fonts were often expensive. There are some fonts used by professionals that are still very expensive. This is because they have an extensive font family.
Fonts are fun. There are thousands of fonts for any creative choice. During the holiday season, I like to use fonts to create my products for the classroom. Posters with vocabulary for the season are a great way to introduce and familiarize students with new vocabulary. They make a great reference for students to use as they write their own scary stories for the classroom.
I want to review five display fonts for you that I think are great to use in a variety of projects. Read my previous article on Fun Fonts for the classroom if you want to learn more about fonts and the difference between display, decorative, and script fonts. I also have an article that covers the installation of fonts for Windows and Mac.
The fonts in this review are available on a site called Creative Fabrica. Creative Fabrica has many wonderful resources created by independent artists and creatives. The fonts are relatively inexpensive to purchase. Most times you can purchase them for less than five dollars.
1. Scary Ghost
The font has lots of swirls and serifs that add to the traditional Halloween look. The image above is a preview of the font from the artist's post. Below I created a poster with common Halloween vocabulary. Display fonts work best for titles and headings. I added some clipart to liven the poster a little.
2. Night Mare
The Night Mare font has the traditional spooky look. The font has more curves in the strokes and less in the serifs. I like the accompanying dingbats. Dingbats are shapes assigned to keystrokes instead of letters. The dingbats include spiders, bats, and webs. I used the web to add some dimension to the text. In this case, I added a text box and layered it with one of the letters. I used the dingbats to add images to the poster. This makes it much easier to design different graphic elements without the need to find and bring in different resources like clip art.
This font uses a block font with Halloween shapes in select areas of the letters. The shapes include ghosts, skeletons, and pumpkins. The font trio includes two other typefaces. The second font option includes the same block style letters in outline format. The outlines are filled with webs. The third option includes Halloween shape dingbats. I used all three typefaces to design the different information and graphic elements.
This makes it easy to design without having to collect and bring in different graphic elements. In this example, the different graphic elements work together to create something that has unity and connection to other elements in the design.
4. Sticky Blood
This font is designed to look like it is melting or dripping. It looks great with the right tone of red. This font only has one typeface member in its family. The blood-like ooze is what sets this font apart from the others. I added some clipart images to get students’ attention.
5. Retro Spooky
This is a fun font with three variations or typefaces in the font family. The first variation is a font that can be used for any purpose. It can be combined with the other two to create something fun and spooky. The second typeface adds pumpkins to the upper case letters and skulls to the lower case letters. The third typeface varies the use of pumpkins and skulls in both upper case and lower case letters.
You will need to combine different typefaces to create some interesting designs. It takes a small amount of work but the results can be nice.
Use the links below to see the other poster images and access the resources used to create the posters. Don’t want to spend the time creating a poster? You can download a free poster or purchase one of my other posters. The posters are formatted to print 24 by 36 inches.
I have created several resources for students. These resources include Halloween word search puzzles, word jumble puzzles, and bingo cards. Use the links below to purchase these resources and support me so I can bring more content for educators.
Halloween word jumble/scramble puzzles
Halloween posters (Download PDF and print on poster printer)
Resources used in this post
Halloween Background Bundle Part 2
Halloween Bundle 40 Designs Vol. 2 Graphics
Happy Halloween Clipart Set
Craved Pumpkin Happy Halloween Clipart
Halloween Creatures
Scary Ghost font
Night Mare font
Retro Spooky font
Sticky Blood font
Scary Halloween Trio font
Cadman font
Worksheets handouts and activities with purpose
Worksheets, now often referred to as handouts or activities to reduce the stigma, are useful tools when used the right way. They should be a constant formative assessment tool.
On my site, digitalmaestro.org, I often refer to worksheets/handouts/activities I have created for classroom use. These resources should be used with the purpose of obtaining measurable information that guides your classroom instruction and student support.
Providing resources for teaching and learning is much easier than it was in the past. Online resources like Teachers Pay Teachers provide venues for teachers to share content they have created. Most of the content on Teachers Pay Teachers is created by other educators. Much of it is available for sale at a modest price. The prices are usually around five dollars or less. There are plenty of free resources too.
I create plenty of content on this site for free. I also create content for Teachers Pay Teachers. The sale of this content helps to fund this website and the materials I use to create content for the site.
One resource I always used in the classroom was worksheets. Worksheets have gotten a bad rap because they were often overused. Sometimes they were used in place of classroom instruction or as filler. The criticism of worksheets is applied to anything that is overused in the classroom without the use of specific measurable outcomes. The digital equivalents are things like Google Classroom, Google Forms, and the endless resources sold to school districts that tout the advantages of using them on a daily basis to raise scores on standardized assessments/tests.
These resources are not bad, they are just used in ineffective ways. A resource is ineffective if it is used without the purpose of obtaining measurable outcomes. Any resource should begin with the question; why am I using this resource? Why am I issuing a handout/worksheet on algebra? If the answer is something like homework or practice, then you are not using the resources to their fullest advantage.
Why am I distributing an exercise in algebra?
I want to measure how much students have learned from my instruction.
I want to find out which students are struggling and where.
I want to measure how much students have retained x weeks or months later.
I want to assess what students know from what they don’t know so I can focus my instruction and student support.
When we distribute an assignment with goals for that worksheet/handout/assignment we turn it into a formative assessment. Anything we do in the classroom should be a formative assessment. We are assessing students and ourselves. We assess students and ourselves during a lesson when we insert a moment to check for understanding. People often refer to it as reading the room.
Worksheets, now often referred to as handouts or activities to reduce the stigma, are useful tools when used the right way. They should be a constant formative assessment tool.
On my site, digitalmaestro.org, I often refer to worksheets/handouts/activities I have created for classroom use. These resources should be used with the purpose of obtaining measurable information that guides your classroom instruction and student support.