Free Halloween Display Fonts
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.