Having grown up on the shores of Maui, Hawaii, Norm has always had a love for drawing. Since leaving the Islands’ beautiful beaches and landing in Oregon he went to college and received a degree in graphic design. Now living in Beaverton, Oregon, Norm has been working as a full-time graphic designer and illustrator for the last 12 years. He has spent countless hours perfecting his craft as a freelance illustrator working on several children’s books, a few video games and creating numerous educational products. His ability to draw has given him the chance to do the thing he truly loves — Create.
In the process of doing Illustration for the Children’s Market, it’s very possible and probable that you’ll need to integrate type into your work. For me this was very true when I did a large amount of work for the licensed industry and t-shirt work. In any case it can be handy to have great resources you can use to tame the serif/sans serif beast!
You’ll find that you’ll exhaust the standard font package that comes with your operating system pretty quickly. (I mean, have you really found a good use for dingbats?) When this time comes you’ll come to realize that adding fonts to your computer can be expensive. A single new font family can run you into the hundreds of dollars depending on it’s popularity and application.
So before you invest a pocket full on a new font, take the time to investigate some websites that offer free fonts for your personal use. I’ve listed a few of my favorites below.
Dafont-Over 10,000 fonts are offered. You can search through a wide variety of categories and subcategories to find the font you need. Mac and PC fonts are available.
Urban Fonts-Urban Fonts has around 8000 fonts available. You can search through the PC and Mac fonts by category, top fonts or latest fonts.
Font Squirrel-Font Squirrel offers an exclusive number of hand picked fonts for your use. Many of them are quite attractive, separated into standard families.
NORM GROCKContributor, Founder
