55 best free fonts for designers
In this freshly updated free fonts for designers post, we bring you the world's best free fonts. We've filtered out the diamonds from the thousands of less perfectly designed free fonts available online, for you to use in your designs and illustrations.
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This list represents the 55 best free fonts we've found in eight categories. You can use the drop-down menu at the top of the page, or the boxout, right, to jump to the section you want.
Don't forget, we have many other articles covering specialist font types including handwriting fonts, kids' fonts, cursive fonts, beautiful fonts, web fonts, professional fonts and more. (You might also like the fonts in our 20 fonts every graphic designer should own article.)
Most of the typeface collections listed here can be used in your projects for free, but please be sure to check the terms. Read on for our pick of the best free fonts, which you can download and use today.
Serif fonts
01. Playfair Display
This free font family is an open source project
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
This free serif display font takes inspiration from the late 18th century European Enlightenment and the work type designer John Baskerville. The high-contract letterforms have delicate hairlines, relating to rise in popularity of pointed steel pens, which took over from the previous broad nib quills during this period.
The typeface design is a project led designed by Dutch designer Claus Eggers Sørensen. It's development is open source, and can be found on GitHub here.
02. Lora
Brushed curves contrast with driving serifs in this free font
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Lora is a free font that has its roots in calligraphy. It was originally designed for type foundry Cyreal in 2011, with a Cyrillic extension added in 2013, and comes in four styles: regular, bold, italic, and bold italic.
Brushed curves contrast with driving serifs to give this free font a well-balanced, contemporary feel. Although Lora is technically optimised for use on the web, it will also work well in print projects.
03. Butler
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Inspired by both Dala Floda and the Bodoni family, Butler is a free font designed by Fabian De Smet. His aim was to bring a bit of modernism to serif fonts, by working on the curves of classical serif fonts, and adding an extra stencil family.
The Butler family contains 334 characters, seven regular weights and seven stencil weights, and includes text figures, ligatures and fractions. It also suits many different languages with its added glyphs. De Smet suggests it would work well for “posters, very big titles, books and fancy stuff.”
04. Arvo
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Arvo is a geometric slab-serif font family that’s suitable for both screen and print use. Designed for legibility, it was created by Anton Koovit and published in the Google Font directory as a free open font (OFL). Unlike many slab serifs on Google Fonts, Arvo contains normal, italic, bold and bold italic styles.
05. Crimson Text
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Here’s a free font family created specifically for book production, inspired by old-time, Garamond-esque book typefaces. Crimson Text is the work of German-born, Toronto-based designer Sebastian Kosch, who says he was influenced by the work of Jan Tschichold, Robert Slimbach and Jonathan Hoefler.
It’s also favourite free font of Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based out of Utah, USA. "Crimson is a sophisticated serif that makes a nice alternative to traditional Garamond-esque typefaces,” he says. “It also has a very expressive italic, which pairs nicely with strong, geometric sans-serifs like Futura or Avenir."
06. Aleo
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Aleo has semi-rounded details and a sleek structure, giving a sense of personality while maintaining a good level of legibility. This free font family comprises six styles: three weights (light, regular and bold), with corresponding true italics. Released under the SIL Open Font License, it was designed by Alessio Laiso, a designer at IBM Dublin, as the slab serif companion to Lato.
07. Cormorant
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Cormorant is a display serif typeface inspired by the Garamond heritage. It was hand-drawn and produced by Christian Thalmann, aka , who describes it as containing “scandalously small counters, razor-sharp serifs, dangerously smooth curves, and flamboyantly tall accents”. The font is best used for headlines and poster text at large sizes, both on screen and in print, but is also highly legible at smaller text sizes.
08. Brela
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Brela is a humanistic serif font designed exclusively for editorial design. With a generous x-height, it’s very legible, even at tiny sizes, yet it works equally well in bold, large headlines. This free font was designed by Spanish creative agency Makarska Studio and comes in regular and bold weights.
09. Libre Baskerville
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Libre Baskerville is a web font optimised for body text (typically 16px). It’s based on the American Type Founder's Baskerville from 1941, but it has a taller x-height, wider counters and a little less contrast, allowing it to work well for reading on screen. This open source project is led by Impallari Type, a type design foundry based in Rosario, Argentina.
"I like to keep my eye on the Libre fonts, like Libre Baskerville,” enthuses Taylor Palmer, a senior UX designer based out of Utah, USA. He also recommends you check out its sister font, Libre Franklin, which is also free. “Libre Franklin hearkens back to strong, traditional typefaces, like Franklin Gothic, that have the declarative nature of something like a newspaper headline but are simple enough to set as paragraph text," he explains.
10. Jura
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
A remarkably elegant font, Jura is characterised by its narrow proportions and distinguishing details, including its rounded, wedge shaped serifs. It looks good at large sizes, but reads well at small ones too. This free font was created by UK-based designer Ed Merritt.
11. Fenix
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Fénix is a calligraphy-inspired font that works well as both display text and body copy. Featuring strong serifs and rough strokes, it provides a lovely rhythm when reading long passages in small text sizes. It’s the work of Fernando Díaz, a designer at Uruguayan foundry TipoType.
12. Luthier
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Luthier is a contemporary typeface characterised by sharp serifs and high contrast, which comes in two weights plus italics. Good for both headlines and body text, it would suit designs focused on serious, intellectual topics. This free font was created by Barcelona-based designer Adrià Gómez.
13. Slabo
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Currently the number one most popular serif font on Google Fonts, Slabo was designed by John Hudson, co-founder of Tiro Typeworks foundry. Slabo is a growing collection of size-specific web fonts, with Slabo 27px and Slabo 13px out so far, fine-tuned precisely for use at those specific pixel sizes. The blocky feel of its ligatures give a modern twist to the serif font, perfect for online designs.
Next page: Free sans-serif fonts
14. Raleway
Raleway is an elegant, sans-serif free font
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Raleway is a free, neo-groesque inspired, sans-serif typeface. It was designed by Matt McInterney (who previously worked at Pentagram) and is available in a single, thin weight. This display typeface includes standard and discretionary ligatures, a good set of diacritics, and both old style and lining numerals. Fans of the font can also experiment with a more geometric-inspired alternate.
15. Aganè
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Designed with wayfinding signage in mind, and equally suitable for user interfaces or anything that requires legibility from an angle, Aganè is a clean sans-serif from Swiss graphic, UI and type designer Danilo De Marco. Free for personal and commercial use, Aganè was inspired by Noorda Font by Bob Noorda, FF Transit by Erik Spiekermann, and Frutiger by Adrian Frutiger.
16. Titillium Web
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
For a free font, Titillium has a highly respectable pedigree, born of a type design project at Italy’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino. Each academic year, a dozen students work on the project, developing it further and solving problems, and they ask all graphic designers who use Titillium in their projects to email them some examples of the typeface family in use, to help them develop it further.
“Titillium has been a favourite font of mine for a few years now,” says Rob Hampson, head of design at The Bot Platform, a new platform for building bots on Messenger. “It’s sharp, contemporary and comes in a wide range of weights. In my opinion, it works best in larger sizes; for example, for titles. That said, with careful consideration, it could be used as a body font.”
17. League Gothic
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
League Gothic is a condensed sans-serif inspired by the classic typeface Alternate Gothic #1, originally designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders Company in 1903. The League of Movable Type decided to make its own version and, as ever, open source it, with contributions from Micah Rich, Tyler Finck and Dannci.
18. Chivo
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Chivo is a grotesque typeface that’s ideal for headlines, and other page furniture where you want to grab attention. Both confident and elegant, it’s been released in four weights with matching italics. This free font is the work of Héctor Gatti and the Omnibus-Type Team.
19. Comfortaa
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Comfortaa is a rounded geometric sans-serif type design intended for large sizes. Created by Johan Aakerlund, a design engineer at the Technical University of Denmark, it’s a simple, good looking font that includes large number of different characters and symbols. Part of the Google Font Improvements Project, the latest updates to the family include the addition of a Cyrillic character set and support for Vietnamese.
David Airey, a graphic designer and occasional writer in Northern Ireland, is among its admirers. “A lot of free fonts need too much work cleaning up the points, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find good options,” he says. “For a recent identity project, I used Comfortaa as the base for a bespoke wordmark. The before and after are really quite different, but Johan’s work gave me a great foundation, and the client loves the result.”
20. Noto Sans
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Noto Sans is a free font family designed by Google supporting more than 100 writing systems, 800 languages, and hundreds of thousands of characters. Noto fonts are intended to be visually harmonious across multiple languages, with compatible heights and stroke thicknesses. The family include regular, bold, italic and bold italic styles, and is hinted. It is derived from Droid, and like Droid it has a serif sister family, Noto Serif.
21. HK Grotesk Hanken
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
HK Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface inspired by the classic grotesques, such as Akzidenz Grotesk, Univers, Trade Gothic and Gill Sans. It was designed by Hanken Design Co with the aim of creating a friendly and distinguishable font that’s suitable for small text. It has recently expanded its language support with the addition of Cyrillic characters (Bulgarian, Russian and Serbian).
22. Aileron
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Aileron is a versatile, neo-grotesque sans-serif that’s somewhere between Helvetica and Univers. Created by Sora Sagano, a designer at Tipotype, it aims to provide readers with a high level of visual comfort. It’s available in 16 weights, from ultralight to black.
23. Ubuntu
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
This free font has been specially created to complement the tone of voice of Ubuntu, the Linux operating system for personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Designed by font foundry Dalton Maag, it uses OpenType features and is manually hinted for clarity on desktop and mobile screens.
24. Clear Sans
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Clear Sans is a versatile font designed by Intel designed with on-screen legibility in mind. Suitable for screen, print, and web, this free font is notable for its minimised characters and slightly narrow proportions, making it a great choice for UI design, from short labels to long passages (it has, for instance, been adopted by Mozilla for the ‘Firefox for Android’ browser).
Created by greg d mcclellandRatighan at Monotype under the direction of Intel, Clear Sans supports a wide range of languages using Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, and includes medium, regular, thin, and light weights with upright, italic, and bold styles.
25. Source Sans Pro
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Released in 2012, Source Sans Pro was the first open source type family for Adobe, and has proved wildly popular. It was envisioned as a classic grotesque typeface with a simple, unassuming design, intended to work well in user interfaces. It was designed by Paul D. Hunt, who continues to work as a type designer at Adobe, and also designed the complementary free font Source Serif Pro.
Source Sans Pro is one of the favourite free fonts of James Hollingworth, a senior-level digital designer and illustrator based near Bath, UK. “It’s such a solid, reliable font to use in design work,” he enthuses. “Being dyslexic myself, I find it a very easy font to read, and it works brilliantly in user interfaces.”
You might also like the fonts in our 20 fonts every graphic designer should own post or even our 15 fantastic logo fonts post.
Next page: free handwriting fonts…
26. Amatic SC
This small caps font is full of personality
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Amatic is a small-caps, hand-drawn web font that is ideal for titles or small runs of text. It has gained popularity for its naive aesthetic, which is brimming with personality. The free font was first designed by Vernon Adams, before being refreshed and revised by Ben Nathan and Thomas Jockin. It is currently features on over 2,400,000 websites.
27. Nickainley
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Nickainley is one of our favourite free handwriting fonts. This Monoline script with a classic, vintage feel, includes uppercase and lowercase characters, as well as numerics and punctuation marks. Offering a variety of possible use cases, including logos, T-shirt designs, letterhead and signage, this free font was created by Indonesian agency Seniors Studio.
28. Shadows into Light
This free handwriting font has rounded edges and a clean feel
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Shadows Into Light is the work of type designer Kimberly Geswein. Ideal for adding a personal touch to your projects, this free font features rounded edges and neat, clean characters. It's currently available in one style only, but has already proven extremely popular.
29. Pacifico
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Pacifico is a fun brush script handwriting font inspired by 1950s American surf culture. This open source font was one of the great contributions to the free software community by the late designer Vernon Adams, who passed away last year.
30. Cute Punk
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Cute Punk offers a vibrant, youthful and thoroughly modern take on the handwriting font. Infusing the style with a striking, almost geometric feel, this free font is the work of Flou, a designer and illustrator from Bratislava, Slovakia.
31. Futuracha
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
An idiosyncratic take on the handwriting font, Futuracha is inspired by John Baskerville’s classic typefaces, as well as Futura Book. Created by Holy, this free font family includes numerics, symbol fonts, and Greek and Latin characters. Designed as a display font, Futuracha could work well when used creatively in headlines, logos or typographical illustrations.
32. Yellowtail
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Yellowtail is an old-school, flat, brush font that evokes classic 1930s typefaces like Gillies Gothic and Kaufmann. Designed by typography institute Astigmatic, its mixture of connecting and non-connecting letterforms gives it a unique look and ensures good legibility.
You might also like the fonts in our 50 great free handwriting fonts post, our 14 calligraphy fonts post or our 10 pretty fonts post.
Next page: free vintage and retro fonts…
33. Cheque
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Based on geometric shapes and with a classic, vintage look, Cheque started off as a student project by Fontfabric's Mirela Belova, then grew into a full display font. At its best when used in headlines or compositions, it comes in Regular and Black versions that are free for both personal and commercial use.
34. Bauru
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Bauru is based on the kind of lettering that instantly sums up the feeling of a bygone age. One of the best free retro fonts, this could work well in portraying a sense of nostalgia and timeless values within a wide range of branding, posters, advertising or logo design. It was designed by Brazilian art director and illustrator Pier Paolo.
35. LOT
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Reminiscent of the stylised block lettering of 1970s and 1980s advertising, posters and magazine design, LOT nonetheless provides a sleek new take on a vintage style with its collection of fat, geometric letterforms. Featuring 78 characters, this free font would work well in posters, logos and headlines. It’s the work of independent type foundry FontFabric.
36. Streetwear
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Streetwear is a cool, retro-inspired script typeface that gives a big nod to 1960s and 1970s fashion and sport designs. Suitable for logo, poster, branding, packaging and T-shirt design, it’s the work of Indonesian studio Artimasa.
37. Paralines Font
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Featuring idiosyncratic use of parallel lines, Paralines takes inspiration from both decades-old design and modern-day typography. This free font would suit any project aiming to evoke the graphic design of the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s the work of freelance UK designer Lewis Latham.
38. Hamurz
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Hamurz is a hipster-style retro typeface with rough edges and rounded shapes. Created by Bagus Budiyanto, it offers a multitude of potential uses, such as logos, headings, or designs for T-shirts, badges or letterpress printing.
You might also like the fonts in our 40 free retro fonts post.
Next page: free brush fonts…
39. Leafy
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Featuring 95 unique, hand-crafted characters, Leafy is an all-caps brush font drawn by Ieva Mezule and assembled by Krisjanis Mezulis of Latvian agency, Wild Ones Design. Perfect for any design that could use a personal, handmade feel, it's free for both personal and commercial use.
40. Playlist
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Playlist is a hand-drawn font with dry brush styles that comes in three varieties: Script, Caps, and Ornament. Ideal for illustrated designs, including posters, T-shirts and other merchandise, this is one of our favourite free brush fonts. It’s the work of Indonesian studio Artimasa.
41. Sophia
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Sophie is light, friendly and slightly off-kilter, in a fun way. Described as “a hand-lettered brush script with a sweet decorative bonus", the family includes multilingual glyphs, as well as left and right stylistic letter combinations. This free font was designed by Mats-Peter Forss and Emily Spadoni, of Finland and the USA respectively.
42. Reckless
- Free for personal and commercial use (pay with a tweet)
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Reckless is a handwritten brush font that includes uppercase and extended Latin characters. As shown above, it would work well with a watercolour-effect design, either in print or on the web. It was created by Russian designer Nadi Spasibenko.
43. Kust
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Kust is a handwritten, all-caps font with a distorted, slightly corrupted look. This free font was based on letters drawn on hard paper, with a thick brush using pure black ink, by fashion designer and artist Leva Mezule. It comes courtesy of Wildtype Design, a studio based in Latvia.
44. Brux
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
While most brush-style free fonts are pretty laid-back, stylistically speaking, Brux is quite rigid and formal, almost evoking the feel of a stencil. This gives it a very fresh and original look. The free font includes Swedish, German and Spanish characters and is the work of Stockholm-based art director Marcelo Melo.
You might also like the fonts in our 10 beautiful fonts post or even our 10 special wedding fonts post.
Next page: free tattoo fonts…
45. Betty
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
None of your hipster stars or tribal tattoos here. Betty is one of those free tattoo fonts that reaches back into the past to a bygone age, when every 'real man' had a sailor’s anchor and ‘I heart Mum’ inked on his bicep. This free font is the work of Athens-based designer Anastasia Dimitriadi.
46. Angilla
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
This tattoo script font draws on the spirit of calligraphy to create something extremely fresh and stylish. This free font is the work of Swedish designer Måns Grebäck.
47. Serval
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Another calligraphic font that’s perfect for tattoo stylings, Serval is a wiry, scratchy beast of a design. This free font is the inspired work of Maelle.K and Thomas Boucherie.
48. MOM
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
MOM is a font inspired by the old-school tattoo lettering of the American tradition, and a tribute to the great tattoo artists of the past. This free font is the creation of Rafa Miguel, an art director based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
49. Original Gangsta
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Want a tattoo font that shows no mercy? Original Gangsta is a hard-edged script font that’s both stylish and uncompromising. This free font was created by Gilang Purnama Jaya, a designer from Indonesia.
You might also like the fonts in our free tattoo fonts post.
Next page: free graffiti fonts…
50. Ruthless Dripping One
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Most free graffiti fonts are really just stylised cursives that lack the sense of art, style and playfulness that’s so central to the urban street art scene. Ruthless Dripping One by Swedish designer Måns Grebäck bucks the trend with this free font, which combines calligraphy with paint drips to create something more on the money.
51. Urban Jungle
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Stencils are a big focus of modern day street art, for both practical and aesthetic reasons. Here, Urban Jungle draws on the stencil tradition and adds a distressed texture that instantly evokes the sweat and fury of the street. It’s the work of Canadian typographer Kevin Christopher, aka KC Fonts.
52. Blow Brush
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
There’s a real energy and boldness to Blow Brush, a handwritten, marker-style font inspired by hip-hop and urban culture. Quirky enough to feel authentic, but formal enough to provide legibility and font functionality, this free font is the work of Petar Acanski, aka Raz, a Serbian multidisciplinary designer and frontend developer. It includes a full set of uppercase characters, numbers, 22 ligatures, a selection of special characters and some variations.
53. Sister Spray
- Free for personal use only
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Sister Spray is a beautifully messy, spray paint-style font that includes letters, numbers and a bunch of splatters, splotches and strokes. This free font is the work of French typeface design workshop ImageX.
54. Tag Type
- Free for personal use and charity use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Tag Type is inspired by graffiti tags that contains upper- and lowercase letters, numerals and punctuation. Both Latin and Cyrillic characters are included in this free font, which is the work of Ukranian designer Andy Panchenko.
You might also like the fonts in our 16 free grunge fonts post.
Next page: free unusual fonts…
55. Gilbert
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Gilbert Baker, who died in 2017, was a LGBTQ activist and artist who's best known for creating the iconic rainbow flag, and he's been commemorated by this striking free display font. Designed with headlines and banner slogans in mind, Gilbert is available as a standard vector font as well as a colour font in OpenType-SVG format, and an animated version.
56. Jaapokki
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Jaapokki is a beautiful sans-serif font featuring clean lines, two alternatives and large set of glyphs that’s great for headlines, posters, logos and more. And Rob Hampson, head of design at The Bot Platform, is particularly attracted to the more unusual elements of this free font family, which was created by Finnish designer Mikko Nuuttila.
“I found Jaapokki around a year ago and instantly fell in love with it,” Hampson explains. “In fact, it’s the font I chose to use on my personal website. It has a range of choices, with some being more experimental than others. For example, ‘alternative subtract’ [shown above] experiments with removing elements of the font. This is definitely one to use at larger sizes.”
57. Carioca Bebas
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Carioca is a fresh, fun and fruity creation, based on a morphological colour and pattern. This delightful free font was developed as part of a three-month experimental type project by Argentinian graphic designers Tano Veron and Yai Salinas.
58. Le Super Serif
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Le Super Serif is that rare thing: a typographical experiment that actually works. It’s described by its creator, Dutch designer Thijs Janssen, as “a fashionable uppercase typeface with a little modern Western flavour to it.” This free font features 88 ligatures and comes in the weights Regular and Semi-Bold.
59. Pelmeshka
- Free (pay with a tweet) for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Most food-themed fonts do what you’d expect; no more, no less. Pelmeshka, though, has gone the extra mile to become something truly unique. Perfect for any design aimed at children, this Bodoni-inspired serif is funny, friendly and oh-so original. This free font is the work of Russian designer Cyril Mikhailov.
60. Tiny Hands
- Free for personal and commercial use
- DOWNLOAD HERE
Even though Buzzfeed is aiming to transform into a serious news organisation, it’s still managing to maintain its sense of fun. And here’s a great example: a free font based on US President Donald Trump’s eccentric handwriting style. It was created by typographer Mark Davis, and apart from being a very funny satire, it could actually work well as a cartoon or comic-book font.
You might also like the fonts in our 10 fonts for kids post, our 10 quirky fonts post or our post.
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