Free American Typewriter Font

Having a free American typewriter font in your design toolkit can seem like quite a coup – it's a useful typeface, and getting it for free would be great, right? But are you sure you have the right one?

"Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology," says one secretary to another on the AMC series Mad Men as she pulls the cover off an IBM electric typewriter. Set in 1961, the show is a reminder that there was a time before computers and thousands of fonts. There was a time when professionalism really only had one typeface: the typewriter, with the amount of white-out streaks on the paper inversely proportional to the skill of the typist.

Many things still carry over into the computer age from the typewriter – most notably the QWERTY layout of the keyboard. But the American Typewriter Font was designed to bring back that feeling from the '60's and before, to translate it to the monitor and to the world of desktop publishing.

American Typewriter font was co-created by New York fontographer Tony Stan and American designer Joel Kaden. Stan was born in 1917, and lived through the amazing transition of media to the desktop computer. He and Kaden created American Typewriter in 1974, as a tribute to the invention that had shaped the correspondence, reading, and standard of what legible writing was for their generation.

The creation of the font was much more an artistic endeavor than it might seem; part of the charm of the typewriter was the slight variations in ink pressure, in the way the ball hit the paper, even in the shades or age of the typewriter ribbon. These things all combined to create a sort of fingerprint, so distinctive that the FBI could track documents to the specific typewriters they were created on.

However, a computer does not have these variations – every letter, every word on the screen or on the printed page would be identical. Stan and Kaden were working to preserve the nostalgia of the mechanical printing process while at the same time making it clear and professional enough for the clean starkness of the digital age. American Typewriter font was the result, and it remains a great success.

There are many free fonts available online – even from professional fontography websites like Chank. However, there are reasons to be wary of other "free" font sites – for more reasons than simply viruses or malware that could be included in the download.

Here is a hypothetical example of why "free" can go wrong. A web designer hears that his client loves the American Typewriter font, and has to have it on the project. Problem is, the designer doesn't have that font on his computer. The thing to do, of course, is to go to Linotype.com and purchase the font face that works best for the project. There are eighteen listed on that website alone,

However, this is a frugal designer, and he'd rather find a way to save money – both for himself and for his client. So he looks for the font on some of the "free" sites – and voila, there it is on Urban Fonts plain as day, Free Font > American Typewriter. Congratulating himself on his google-fu, he proceeds to use the font on the project for the client.

Unfortunately, this leads to him being fired. Why? Because if you don't look closely, you won't notice that the free American Typewriter font was not the Stan-Kaden creation – it was a font created by Etherealcat. That fontographer had taken the stressed and distorted letters of the typewriter and exaggerating, making a slightly menacing, very post-modern typeface that is fine if that's what you want.

However, the client had wanted that clean legibility that American Typewriter from the International Typeface Company created. Take it as a cautionary tale – free can be good, but "let the buyer beware" still applies.

• How Do I Enable Javascript on my Computer
• Really Cool HTML Codes
• Worst Traffic Rankings
• Design A Web Page Quiz
• Cursive Handwriting Font

• Free Helvetica Font
• Free Fonts Helvetica Truetype
• Free Forum Hosting Without Ads
• Download a Free Copy of Dreamweaver
• Animated Falling Snow GIFS

• Category:Web Design Tools