Free font, or is it? Free Fonts have licensing restrictions if you intend to use them commercially.

The world of the graphic designer in the 1980's was a fast changing place. While the hairstyles were high and remained so for the decade, few other things stayed the same.

A Letraset sheet showing used letters in grey
and black letters still to be transferred to the ad.

How exciting it was. Letraset was king, but overnight fell to the computer age, giving up a position it had held firm through 60's and 70's Commercial Art.  For those of you who weren't lucky enough to be there, Letraset was a plastic sheet of black type that worked like a kid's transfer: you aligned the dotted lines on the Letraset sheet to a line ruled on your ad and rubbed the type with a pencil to transfer the glyph to your paper. Tricky stuff to align and space type by hand, if you were out by a millimetre or two you had to scrape the letter off with a scalpel and start again.

Letraset was used for every ad and it was $15 for a page in 1983. For $15 you got an A3 page of letters in a fontface at a particular size, so studios needed a library of Letraset sheets in different fonts and sizes to get through any typical day. Production could be held up for an hour because there were no more Os, for example, on the sheet (all used up in the previous days work) but such was life in the commercial art business and we couldn't live without Letraset. However, Letraset's glory days were done and dusted by the end of the decade.

Computers entered the industry and Fonts became available to designers through Quarkxpress( released in 1987) and Adobe Illustrator (released in 1988). With the embrace of graphic software, the process of creating ads became expedient and the name of our business changed seamlessly from commercial art to Graphic Design. The fonts that came with the Adobe software were luxurious in number compared to word processing software, which offered about 4. Adobe Type Libraries became available on CD shortly after and when you bought the CD you purchased the license to use the fonts commercially.

Today, it's so easy to find new Fonts on the net. Font foundries and independent font creators release free fonts for download.

How do I load the fonts into my computer after I've downloaded them?
If you're on a Mac use Font Book to load in the fonts you've downloaded off the net. Double click on the fonts zip file to extract the files first, then in Font Book use the Add Font command under File in the main menu and select the entire font folder. Click Open and your done. You'll find the font available in your software.
In a PC,  open the zip file and copy the contents of the folder. There is usually several files in the folder, you may see .otf(open type fonts) and .ttf(true type fonts) files. Copy these into the fonts folder in the Windows folder in your HD. You may need to restart your computer to have the files kick in, but when you relaunch your design software you should see the new fonts.

Inside the Quicksand file are Quicksand
open type font files(otf) in a number of styles(bold,
italic, etc) and the license agreement bottom.

Does the licensing agreement allow you to use the free font in your print or online publishing? 
With free fonts, beware! The licence of free fonts is usually restricted. You may not have permission to use the font commercially, read the licensing agreement. Commercially means in Print, but can extend to other commercial purposes like online publishing if there is a commercial intent.

Commercial print providers may rebuke your job if it contains unlicensed fonts. To read the license return to the zip file you downloaded from the net, it will be a .txt file there, but if it's been many years and the license is lost, do a search online with the name of the font to find the license. You may find you have to pay the font creator a small fee for a commercial license, consider it fair remuneration for the many hours that go into creating a font, it's pretty technical and tedious work.

If you're after more information you can read: Free fonts, free is not always free or The facts about Font Licensing.