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You don’t always need graphics, photos, or images to make your design pop — sometimes the right font does the trick. But going to every corner of the internet isn’t feasible for most designers and marketers. You’ve got projects to create, often on deadlines that are way too tight. You’ve also got a fairly strict budget that you can’t blow installing a font here or there that might work with your designs. 

So to help out, we’ve scoured the internet for you and compiled 35 of the most beautiful and useful fonts to use in your marketing. Bonus: You won’t break the bank trying to find one that works best for you. Here’s what we found.

Get tips for using fonts in your content and web designs in our free do-it-yourself design guide here.

35 Beautiful Fonts to Download for Free

Free Serif Fonts

1) Playfair Display

You don’t have to stick to Times New Roman to have your marketing taken seriously. This font is the perfect balance between professional and creative.

2) Gabriela

If you’d like a casual and soft version of a serif font, give Gabriela a try.

3) Della Respira

This serif font is versatile — it could fit perfectly in an ancient fairy tale or on your latest ebook cover.

4) Neuton

Like Playfair Display, Neuton is a fairly classic font. Because of its larger, yet more compact width, the font is perfect for mobile.

5) Junge

Inspired by calligraphy, this font is elegant, yet flexible. It works for both headers and body copy — whichever works best with the rest of your design.

6) Esteban

If you want a serif font with some personality, this font is for you. It has varied widths in the font stems (the main vertical strokes in each letter) so it comes across as more playful than typical serif fonts.

7) Dubiel

This font makes me think of Vogue — it’s elegant, stylish, and timeless. It could be a great font to spice up your next event invitations.

8) Droid Serif 

Here’s a font that works really well for small screens. Thanks to the slightly condensed letterforms, you’ll be able to fit more words in less space.

9) Ramaraja 

If you’re looking for something a little unique but not too crazy, this font could be the perfect fit.

Free Sans Serif Fonts

10) Quicksand

This sans serif font is thin and delicate, but it would work well in both body copy and headers.

11) Lato

Serif fonts aren’t the only ones that can feel serious. Created specifically for a corporate client, this font is both solid and warm because of its sleek and rounded letters.

12) Abel

This font is modern and condensed, created originally for posters and headlines. Maybe it could work for your next infographic headline?

13) Tuffy

A fairly standard, easy-to-read, and fun sans serif font, Tuffy would work perfectly in a long block of text.

14) Poiret One 

Looking for a font that’s sleek, simple, and decorative? Try this one, which is based on geometric forms and is great for short texts. Try it on large signs, labels, posters, T-shirts, titles, or headlines.

15) Colaborate

A little bit thinner than Tuffy, Colaborate is another fairly classic sans serif font — with a twist. I love how some of the letters’ tails round out at the end, and some don’t.

16) Ruluko

This sans serif font could pass for someone’s very neat handwriting — perfect for adding a human touch to your marketing without looking like you scribbled it yourself.

17) Josefin Sans

This font is thin and very geometric, with a surprise in the letter “z.” Check it out below:

18) Nunito 

Here’s a great font for displays, whether it’s the text on your homepage, your blog headers, or on a sign somewhere.

Free Handwriting Fonts

19) Amatic SC

This hand-drawn font would be perfect for a poster or header that needs an artistic feel.

20) Zeyada

If you’re going for that grocery-list-scribbling look, this font is perfect for you. Whatever it lacks in “cleanliness,” it makes up for in personality.

21) Indie Flower 

The name says it all. This font is not only easy to read, but it’s also open and inviting thanks to its bubbly, rounded edges.

22) Dancing Script

Sometimes it can feel like you’re trading font personality for readability. Not with this font — it’s both lively and readable.

23) Calligraffitti

This font is inspired by the designer’s experience with calligraphy and a “rare encounter with the mood-altering music of Santana” … can you tell? It’s both classic and funky — perfect for your next SlideShare slide cover.

24) BlackJack

Another cursive-style font, BlackJack is friendly and elegant. Can’t you just imagine this on a Parisian café’s menu?

25) Pacifico

Though the cursive letters in this font are bold and close together, it’s fairly easy to read. I’d suggest using this font in a header or subheader as it is too bold and condensed for body copy.

26) Gloria Hallelujah 

Here’s a fun one that reminds me of passing notes in class. It’s no wonder, seeing as this font is based on the handwriting of a Korean high school student! Note: It looks great in all caps, too.

27) Rock Salt

This one reminds me of a comic-style font. It’s great for a zippy, casual, hand-lettered look. (Or for your next OOO sign.)

28) Carrington

This font is one of the most detailed in the “handwriting” category. I love the small space between some of the lines within letters — check out n, m, or h to see what I mean.

Free Script or Cursive Fonts

29) Autour One

This font looks like a modern take on medieval calligraphy — check out the diagonal points at the bottom of most of the letters. This font is a great way to add an older feel to a new design.

30) Gravitas One

Want to grab someone’s attention NOW? This bold font makes you perk up and listen to whatever the copy says — right this instant.

31) Londrina

This font reminds me of those block letters you draw in grade school on a science fair poster — though the font is way more proportional and neat than mine ever were. The hand-drawn feel of the font makes you feel like there’s a human behind the design.

32) Monoton

This font shouldn’t be used for small designs — it’s made to be large, loud, and proud. It’s kind of trippy with all the three parallel lines in each letter, but it could look great on a Facebook cover photo or Pinterest pin.

33) Fascinate

This font reminds me of the font used for Broadway show posters. It combines thin and thick letter weighting, which is much easier to read in larger font sizes. This font could be a great way to change up your next webinar invite. 

34) Gorditas

Though it’s another take on hand-drawn block letters, this font is more compact and versatile. Bonus: It has hearts above lowercase i’s and j’s for an extra dose of adorable.

35) Miltonian Tattoo

This tattooish font has lots of intricate details to make your designs look unique. For example, there are little embellishments of curls and points on most of the capital letters — the perfect way to make your design stand out.

Editor’s Note: We hope you will find these fonts helpful — but because they are offered by other parties on their sites, we can’t make any guarantees or promises about them (like that they will be available or free to use). Also, we want to mention that the folks who offer these fonts might have rules about how you can or can’t use them, so there might be limitations that are applicable to use of the font.

This post was originally published in July 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 
                                   

Content is king, but it’s a noisy world out there. For those in the nonprofit space, it is enough of a challenge creating the content that tells your story, to say nothing about then getting that story heard.

The good news is there are several strategies we can employ to have our voices heard above the noise, some of which actually involve creating less content. Getting more out of your time and effort is especially important for nonprofit whose employees wear many hats, leaving precious little time to devote to content. Let’s unpack some strategies that can help you make the most out of your content.

Tips to Repurpose Your Nonprofit’s Content

Be an Editor Instead of a Writer

In my early days producing content, I felt that I had to be the author of every story that showed up on our website. Make the same mistake, and you’ll miss an important opportunity that saves time and adds new flavor to your content. You’re only one person at the end of the day, making it is impossible to scale up your content efforts if you’re the only one contributing. Instead, seek out donors, volunteers, and even clients who would like to write a story about your organization. By adding perspectives and voices from others to your content mix, you’ll save time and generate new buzz around each piece of content you publish.

Tips for Reaching out to Nonprofit Guest Contributors:

• Give them prompts. For example, ask that rock star volunteer to write a post about his/her experiences or encourage a client to write a quick blurb about how your organization helped them.
• Repurpose stories. You likely already have stories of clients that you’ve used in mailings and other publications. Repurpose these materials into fresh content on your blog, digital offers, or website.
• Spotlight a donor or member. Get a key donor on the phone for 5-10 minutes, learn about them and why the donate, then write up a quick spotlight based on your conversation.

Turn One Story Into Multiple Forms Of Content

Every piece of content you produce is competing against millions of other blog posts, Tweets, videos, website pages, etc. Maximize the reach of the content you put out by turning it into multiple additional forms of content. For example, a blog post can easily be turned into a podcast by recording a narrated version of it. Conversely, videos, testimonials, emails from clients, and more can be turned into blog posts by having portions of them transcribed. By repurposing existing content into new mediums, you’ll be able to cut through the noise and reach new audiences.  

Tips for Creating Content in Multiple Forms:

• Distribute content on social media. You can post an image on Instagram to highlight a blog post or content offer. Visual content can be the vehicle to back a compelling written narrative. Or consider pulling a quote out of a blog post for Twitter. Tweets are short and sweet and a great tool to drive traffic by linking back to the post.
• Use a post to make a YouTube video. For example, if you have a blog post that is instructional (e.g. how we raised $1,000 in 10 days) you can easily use this to create a video of you in front of the camera walking people through the process.
• Link multiple blog posts together to create a whitepaper. Find topics in which you are an expert, and create several smaller pieces that can fit together into a larger offer. For example, I once wrote a series of blog posts on storytelling at nonprofits and then linked them all together to create a whitepaper called, The Ultimate Guide to Storytelling at Nonprofits.

Repurpose on Multiple Mediums

The most common mistake many nonprofits make is only telling their story on their own website and social media channels. 

Think of ways you can share your content with an audience that hasn’t seen it yet. For example, you could ask other bloggers to publish your content as a guest post or submit an editorial to your local paper’s website. Getting your message distributed beyond your walls doesn’t necessarily require a paid budget.  Build relationships with bloggers and other influencers who are writing about your issue area. Once you have that framework set, it is relatively easy to ask them to share content that will be of value for their audience.

Create a Content Savings Account

A content savings account is simply a bank of longer blog posts that you can use as main posts, cut down for shorter posts, and repurpose for guest posts. Creating a repository of content on larger themes can help guide your future content calendars and the publications on which you’ll search for guest posting opportunities.

One way to get started with this is by crafting an outline for all the content you’ll need for the next 2-3 months, then, spend 2-3 weeks focusing on writing drafts for all of it. That may seem like a daunting task, but a solid outline and plan of attack make it attainable. Once in place a content savings account will allow you to focus more on sharing your story, rather than writing it day-by-day. 

Keep in mind that while this is an effective strategy, you’ll still want to budget time for on the fly content creation. A good way to do this is to build out longer articles as part of your content savings account and use current events to write shorter articles as they come up.

Repackage Content Several Times Across Several Different Mediums

It can be helpful to set up some internal standards around how often, and where you plan to repurpose your content. For example, our organization created a matrix that encourages us to share each piece of content 5 times, and in 3 different mediums. For example, one ebook could be shared with 5 different Facebook groups, 5 different newspaper websites, and 5 different blogs.

These numbers may be different in your case, so do some testing to find the frequency that works best for you.

Reshare Content from Others

There is no shortage of great content beyond what your team produces that is relevant to your audience. Find articles, blogs, podcasts, and videos that fit your tribe and re-share them through your own channels. If you’d like to reuse a piece of content on your own website, however, you’ll want to ask permission from the author before reposting.  

The most amazing part of this process is that by lifting others up, you create synergies that help everyone to grow. When you share the work of others, you create a win-win relationship with them that can result in them helping you share your story as well.  

Winning the Content Battle

There’s no doubt that the content battle is a tough one, but the good news is that much of your ‘competition’ is spending too much time producing content and far too little time promoting it. Use the strategies above and get your story heard in a way that brings people into your movement.

Tweets, by nature, have very short lifespans.

Every time you post a new tweet, it has only minutes in the spotlight before getting drowned out by newer tweets. In fact, every second, 9,100 new tweets are posted by Twitter users around the globe.

That’s a lot of content you never get to see. How do you find the Twitter content you’d actually really like to see, but never get the chance to discover?

Until last week, there’s never really been an easy way of finding those great tweets. But now we have Twitter’s brand new feature called “Moments” to make news updates and other quality content more easily findable, browseable, and shareable. Twitter calls it “the best of what’s happening on Twitter in an instant.”

You can find Moments in a new tab next to the Notifications and Messages tabs. It’s marked by a lightning bolt icon.

Here it is on the web:

And here it is on mobile:

So what’s the deal with Twitter Moments, anyway? What is it, whom was it made for, and how do you use it? Let’s dig in.

What Is Twitter Moments?

Twitter Moments is a new feature (announced on October 6, 2015) that helps users quickly find some of the trending tweets and stories of the moment.

These “best tweets” are called Moments, and they’re a collection of tweets curated by a small editorial team at Twitter, covering local and global news stories, sports updates, and entertainment news, as well as “fun” content like this curation of tweets featuring pictures of fall foliage. In fact, Moments are divided into those four categories: News, Sports, Entertainment, and Fun.

Again, all of these Moments are tweets, not articles. In fact, many tweets within Moments don’t even include links to articles. Here’s what a Moment about the Princeton professor who won a Nobel Prize looks like, for example:

Princeton professor wins Nobel Prize

Most Moments are handpicked, organized, and updated throughout the day by a small editorial team led by Andrew Fitzgerald, a former Al Jazeera and current TV journalist. Using real-time data, Fitzgerald’s team can see which tweets are going viral — and from there, find the best and most representative tweets of a given story. According to The Verge, the team tends to choose tweets that come directly from the source: “People who are on the scene, or are directly involved in the news story.”

Some Moments are contributed by Twitter partners like Bleacher Report, Mashable, The New York Times, and Washington Post. The posts contributed by partners are marked clearly, as you can see below.

For now, access to the entire Moments tab is only available to users in the U.S., but those outside the U.S. can view direct links to individual Moments. The folks at Twitter are working on rolling Moments out to people in other countries over the next few weeks.

Whom Was It Made For?

Since the content for Moments is handpicked by the small editorial team and isn’t personalized to your individual interests, it’s especially helpful for Twitter newbies, casual users, and the less tech-savvy folks among us. It works even if you don’t follow a single person on Twitter or have never tweeted yourself.

“We want to bring the best of what is happening on Twitter to users who might be new to Twitter, or who don’t use Twitter all that often,” says Fitzgerald.

“We’re looking for people who have either tried and kind of given up, or people who use it and know there’s good content there but for one reason or another they haven’t really gotten the experience that we all get out of it here,” says Madhu Muthukumar, the product manager for Moments.

The goal? To eliminate the extra steps that some users might have trouble with, like trying to figure out what to search for and how to find it. Moments does that work for us by surfacing popular and newsworthy content, says Muthukumar. 

How to Use Twitter Moments

How to Browse Moments

To browse Moments, you’ll first need to go to the Moments home screen. Get there by clicking or tapping on the “Moments” tab, marked by a lightning bolt on both the Twitter website and the iOS and Android apps.

The home screen is called “Today,” and it features a collection of the day’s top stories across all four categories: News, Entertainment, Sports, and Fun. If you’re looking for stories in a particular category, all you need to do is click into the category to find more relevant stories.

Find a story that interests you? Great! Click on it to see the Moment. Each Moment features ten or so tweets handpicked by Twitter’s editorial team. These tweets are mostly a mix of plain text, photos, and videos, with only a smattering of tweets that link to full articles.

Want to share the whole Moment with others? You can share the link to the Moment or get the embed code for the Moment by clicking the ellipsis icon, which is located on the top right-hand corner on the web or at the bottom-right corner on mobile. (You can embed a Moment on your website or blog the same way you would embed a tweet. Learn how to do that here.)

Want to share an individual tweet you see in the Moment? You can take any action you could for a normal tweet, like “favoriting” it, retweeting it, following the person’s profile, and so on.

How to Follow a Moment

The Moments editorial staff updates Moments as new information is added or more great tweets on the subject are published.

You’ll know new content has been added to a Moment since you last viewed that Moment if you see a blue dot appear in the top right-hand corner of the Moment’s featured image.

Twitter gives you the option of following a Moment for the stories that update frequently, like a live football match or the Oscars. If you see that option and click “Follow,” any tweets added to the Moment will appear in your Twitter timeline in real time.

Takeaways for Marketers

At this point, you might be asking what a marketer like you might do about this.

Unfortunately, because Twitter’s editorial team controls all the content on Moments right now, there’s not a whole lot marketers and publishers can do to get their content on Moments. They aren’t taking pitches from anyone else at the moment.

One way of getting around that barrier? Write guest articles for one of Moments’ partners, and then request they pitch your piece to Moments. Keep in mind the topics Moments features are mostly current events and other popular, newsworthy topics.

Moments’ partners include Bleacher Report, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly, Fox News, Mashable, New York Times, Vogue, and Washington Post — and Twitter plans to expand that program in the future. To get you started, here’s a list of guest blogging guidelines for top media outlets, including Mashable and New York Times.

Another way is to create native advertisements in conjunction with one of those partners. If you can partner up with one of them to create a native advertisement, you can work with them to get that piece of content featured on Twitter Moments and therefore exposed to potentially hundreds of millions of Twitter users.

Right now, the team of people choosing and writing short descriptions for each and every moment is quite small. The company says it has plans to expand that team in the future, especially as it makes the Moments feature available in other countries and languages.

But it’s likely that, at some point, this will have to scale to a point where Moments can’t always be handpicked. What then?

To prepare for that possibility, marketers should pay close attention to the types of tweets getting featured in Moments. It’s a vastly visual platform, and the majority of tweets include photos and videos — especially Vines. (Don’t underestimate Vines — here’s a simple guide for how to use Vine in your marketing.)

When it comes to Moments that cover specific events, it seems as though Moments’ editorial team might be finding a lot that content through an event’s official hashtag, like #corgicon below.

Corgi Con 🐶🐾

We have yet to see Periscope videos included in Moments, but that could be only a matter of time. (Here’s an introduction to Periscope for those of you who are new to the platform.)

The folks at Inside Pitch PR predict users will eventually be able to create a personal Moments section to tell their own stories to their followers. A move like this would mean brands could curate their own Moments to showcase a news story about them, tweets about an event they’re hosting or sponsoring, or what a day in the life at the office looks like. 

Does Twitter advertising have a place in all this? Fitzgerald says they’re “still working on the revenue piece for Moments.” But sponsored tweets could easily have a place in Moments’ future as a way for Twitter to generate more revenue. For marketers, it might be worth trying to experiment with Twitter advertising now — that way, if the possibility of sponsored posts for Moments rolls out, you know what content you should promote to generate better ROI.

Though Moments doesn’t immediately add ton of items to your to-do list, it hits at the future of Twitter — one with a focus on wrangling the social network’s firehose of content.

What do you think of Twitter Moments? How do you think marketers should be thinking about it? Share with us in the comments below.