Versatile and comfortable to work with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers. My particular safety blankets are: Myriad, Gotham, DIN, Akzidenz Grotesk and Interstate among the sans Mercury, Electra and Perpetua among the serif faces.Ī large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a range of voices and emotions. Usually, these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). It’s not that I like these better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to wind up wearing them most of the time.Įvery designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like comfortable jeans: they go with everything, they seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the closet day after day. More often, I find myself putting on the same old pair of Levis morning after morning. Every designer has a few favorite fonts like this - expressive personal favorites that we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to use. My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I bought at a thrift store, but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet very often outside of Halloween. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. Used under Creative Commons license.)įor better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. The most appropriate analogy for picking type. This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality. Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. There seem to be endless choices - from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts - with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. In the end, you will learn how to pick the right typeface and what it requires.įor many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. In this context, knowing the difference between ‘font’ and ‘typeface’ simply doesn’t carry the same weight as it did in traditional printing.The article will cover 5 main principles which will provide you with the practical guidance how to select, apply and mix different fonts. Any changes you want to do in a font - whether is size, weight or even color - you do everything digitally, with relative ease and speed, and without any high costs. Even in CSS, you use the font-family property to set a typeface for the text. The word font now refers to the syle and the look. A font is merely a document you install that allows you to use a particular typeface. With any software, and you are asked to choose a font and not a typeface, which would make more sense. The confusion of the two terms actually came with the rise of digital publishing and the naming convention in operating systems. So, in this case, it seemed crucial to use the correct terminology to avoid expensive printing production errors. In this collection, you could find pieces for every size, weight and style or typeface. To set your type, you had to use a collection of metal pieces called fonts. During the Printing Press era, the terms ‘font’ and ‘typeface’ actually had very distinctive meanings.
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