Your favourite font choices

[Gordon McLeod]

Microgamma Bold Extended

[Bobby Henderson]

The fact that you actually need to buy and/or license fonts for your usage scenario is something that a lot of people don't even know. Even those fonts that are offered "Free to Download" may come with caveats, like that they're only free for non-professional use. Most people don't even know there are different versions of fonts. Heck, most don't even know what a font family is and will happily use the faux italic version of any given font.

The whole thing can turn into a quite a deep rabbit hole.

There are not only different versions of the same typeface design, but they may be different apart from each other in subtle ways. If a store front channel letter sign set in Futura gets damaged by hail it will be a real adventure for us to match the letters unless we have the original art files. Multiple vendors have their own versions of Futura (Linotype, Bitstream, URW, Tilde, Neufville Digital, Monotype, etc). None are exact carbon copies of each other. They look the same. But when you set something like a letter "E" set in Bitstream Futura Bold over the top of a "E" set in Monotype's Futura Now they don't line up exactly.

Then there's all the knock-off fonts. Helvetica has a around a dozen or more "Helveti-clones." Fonts like Nimbus Sans, Swiss 721 BT and CG Triumvirate are examples. Even among actual Helvetica-named fonts various releases through the years will have subtle differences in the outlines or changes in the character sets.

Buying and/or licensing fonts can be its own rabbit hole too. We buy new type families on occasion to keep things "fresh." It's a hazard to rely on something like a font bundle in CorelDRAW. Even though that collection has around 1000 fonts it is rarely updated and it getting pretty stale. The Adobe Fonts service in Creative Cloud is nice since they periodically add newer type families from a wide variety of type foundries.

In the way-back world...I did (and somewhere around here) still do have font families purchased from Adobe, as I recall. They are on the 3.5" diskette. I'd say that I have probably 10 or more and the ones I continue to use have migrated on every computer since...e.g. Helvetica, Tekton...etc. New Century Schoolbook is such a font that I have used for my go-to Serif font but I have not been so good at migrating to new computers. Also, back in the day, I had a program called "Font Hopper" that would migrate those Post Script fonts into other formats supported by Windows and such...again, we are going back a ways.

I still have some of my oldest software boxes (Photoshop 2.5, Illustrator 4, CorelDRAW 3, etc) including the install discs. Fractal Design's Painter was packaged in a paint can in its earliest few versions. The box for Adobe Illustrator 4 had a plastic binder containing a bunch of 3.5" floppy discs, four or so of the discs contained the application installer and the rest were a collection of about 200 Postscript Type 1 fonts. Typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk consumed a good bit of that 200 font count.

Back in the early 1990's I also bought a few typefaces that were just one or two fonts on a 3.5" floppy. Letraset sold a couple or so dozen "Fontek" fonts in that manner. When DTS was introduced I bought a copy of Letraset Dolmen on a floppy to have the font they used to create the "dts" letters. I might still have the actual disc.

One sad thing: back in January Adobe announced they would discontinue support for Postscript Type 1 fonts in all of their applications by January 2023. Type 1 font support is being removed from Photoshop CC this year, but that announcement was made in 2019. This doesn't affect Postscript itself. Existing EPS or PDF files with embedded T1 fonts can still be placed into applications like InDesign, Illustrator and FrameMaker, as well as be exported to PDF.

Nevertheless, for content creation users will have to make conversions of their old Type 1 fonts to continue using them. There are several web sites that do font conversions. To get the best results (and do batch conversions) applications like TransType by FontLab will be a better choice.

I think my favourite font for use in web design is Google's Roboto. It just looks very pleasing to me, and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 so can be freely used.

Roboto is the primary system typeface for Android. It's a clean looking typeface and has a decent character set. According to Font Squirrel the most popular free/open source typeface is currently Montserrat. I see Lato used quite a bit (Lato doesn't work for all purposes), so I'm starting to get annoyed by that one.

It's funny to think that a few decades ago, a major decider of what printer to buy was what fonts it supported. I have the font brochure that can with a 1985 Apple LaserWriter (first printer with PostScript) that describes the dozen or so built in fonts. And then more than half of the printer's owners manual is actually advice on how to typeset documents, when to use which fonts, how diagrams can be used, etc. It's facinating looking back on that now, and probably still quite relevant and useful actually!

Lots of computers users today couldn't even fathom resident fonts inside a laser printer. It was a big thing back in the 1980's. I can remember writing documents in the MS-DOS version of Word Perfect on a monochrome screen and not knowing how things were going to look until the document came out of the printer.

Today computers have so much more processing power, storage capacity and graphics capability that it's not necessary to download font into a printer. You can embed font data into PDFs and even some other application file types.

Here are two fonts I used for my company logos some years back... TrueType's "Chainlink" and "Metalcut". I really liked the somewhat industrial, and pardon the pun, "heavy metal" look of the fonts, and they seemed to work well together. I may still have the 3.5 disc for them somewhere, along with a variety of other fonts on that set.

If your copy of "Chainlink" is the one I remember it was a knock-off of VGC Serpentine, or what I call "the Lethal Weapon font." Linotype has the rights to Serpentine now. It was first designed by Dick Jensen in 1972. The Chainlink font I had came on a floppy disc that required an installer for the fonts to work. Corel made that issue a moot point point by licensing Serpentine as one of the fonts bundled in CorelDRAW in the mid 1990's.

[Van Dalton]

In a résumé prep course I had to take in college one of the things they stressed is to absolutely NEVER, EVER use Comic Sans MS, Technical or (gag) Wingdings if you expect to be taken seriously. Not sure why they even had to bring it up since it should have been readily obvious and nobody with any common sense would do that, but evidently somebody somewhere must have tried it. Ironically they stressed favouring Times New Roman and Aerial over others. Again, who knows why; those are probably the last fonts I'd ever choose for professional business documents like résumés. I guess it takes all kinds.

Trajan was never my "preferred font." Not sure what your roll-eyes emoji is about, especially when the reaction is to something I posted 19 years ago.

Dude, you know I was totally screwing with you. I was playing on how sick of Trajan you were back then. That's not the "rolleyes" icon but the "uhoh" icon , indicating a sense of impending doom. No need to take it personally or even seriously.

Anyone remember those "Key Fonts" CD-ROMs in the value software aisle? The number of fonts bundled into any kind of office productivity application or graphics software was a good bullet point to print on the retail box. Fonts were more of a novelty to general purpose computer users back then. So, yeah, if someone spent $20 on a CD with 500 knock-off fonts he was probably going to try to use a bunch of them. File sharing sites on the Internet killed some of the business model for retail font software packages to sell in stores.

Yes, and I think I may actually still have the couple that I picked up in junior high school in the late 90s. Only they weren't called "Key Fonts, I think one was "1000 Fabulous Fonts" (really just mostly Alltype conversions of name-brand payware ones) and another one was a collection of graphics fonts.

Funny how quaint those seem today. There are sites like Mufonts and Font Empire that have hundreds of thousands of (real, not knockoff!) fonts for free download (some are pirateware, but who cares). Yet as a zit-faced 14 year old nerd with a Pentium II and a 4 GB hard drive and no life, hobbies or fe/male counterpart, 1000 fonts on a CD seemed enormous.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Here are two fonts I used for my company logos some years back... TrueType's "Chainlink" and "Metalcut". I really liked the somewhat industrial, and pardon the pun, "heavy metal" look of the fonts, and they seemed to work well together. I may still have the 3.5 disc for them somewhere, along with a variety of other fonts on that set.

For daily use, I am boring and just use TNR.

[David Ferguson]

I think my favourite font for use in web design is Google's Roboto. It just looks very pleasing to me, and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 so can be freely used.

It's funny to think that a few decades ago, a major decider of what printer to buy was what fonts it supported. I have the font brochure that can with a 1985 Apple LaserWriter (first printer with PostScript) that describes the dozen or so built in fonts. And then more than half of the printer's owners manual is actually advice on how to typeset documents, when to use which fonts, how diagrams can be used, etc. It's facinating looking back on that now, and probably still quite relevant and useful actually!

[Steve Guttag]

In the way-back world...I did (and somewhere around here) still do have font families purchased from Adobe, as I recall. They are on the 3.5" diskette. I'd say that I have probably 10 or more and the ones I continue to use have migrated on every computer since...e.g. Helvetica, Tekton...etc. New Century Schoolbook is such a font that I have used for my go-to Serif font but I have not been so good at migrating to new computers. Also, back in the day, I had a program called "Font Hopper" that would migrate those Post Script fonts into other formats supported by Windows and such...again, we are going back a ways.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The fact that you actually need to buy and/or license fonts for your usage scenario is something that a lot of people don't even know. Even those fonts that are offered "Free to Download" may come with caveats, like that they're only free for non-professional use. Most people don't even know there are different versions of fonts. Heck, most don't even know what a font family is and will happily use the faux italic version of any given font.

But Frank does have a point. I don't know how to call the phenomenon, that's why I'll name it the "Lens Flare Syndrome"... You may remember back in the day when Photoshop was considered somewhat of a new thing. Many amateurs got their copy via the "grey market" and started to get "creative". That often resulted in putting a fake lens flare or a beveled edge on everything. It's something you can observe across industries. Once a certain new "trick" becomes available, it has to be used everywhere, until the novelty wears off and we finally start to use the thing for what it is good.

[Bobby Henderson]

20+ years ago font files were a commodity that were somewhat easier to sell to the general public for most computing uses. Anyone remember those "Key Fonts" CD-ROMs in the value software aisle? The number of fonts bundled into any kind of office productivity application or graphics software was a good bullet point to print on the retail box. Fonts were more of a novelty to general purpose computer users back then. So, yeah, if someone spent $20 on a CD with 500 knock-off fonts he was probably going to try to use a bunch of them.

File sharing sites on the Internet killed some of the business model for retail font software packages to sell in stores. Web sites offering high quality commercial fonts for sale were launched, as were sites offering lesser quality fonts as various levels of free-ware or share-ware. In recent years sites like Google Fonts and Font Squirrel have offered collections of good quality yet free fonts.

I buy a good amount of commercial type in my work, but commercial fonts can get pretty expensive. The trick is to catch a really good, useful type family when it is on sale. Some type families can be discounted up to 90% off when they're first introduced. And an existing type family may occasionally go on sale, sometimes at a deep discount. I think the motive is to get a bunch of people to jump on those sales to boost overall revenue but also drive the popularity of that typeface. If more people use it other designers will get stuck paying full price for it later.

[Frank Cox]

I wonder if the novelty of having umpty-zillion available fonts has worn off to some extent. Twenty years ago almost every printed document looked like a ransom note. Today, not so much.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm not a big fan of Times or Times New Roman. One problem is its default nature and appearance on so many governmental and office type documents (along with default Arial). The next problem is the lack of variety in weights bundled in the Windows version. Four basic weights is all. And then the characters do not space together very well. Spacing issues can be common with some "modern" and "transitional" serif typefaces, this is especially true for Times New Roman. The only positive thing I can say about it is the version bundled in Windows 10 does have a decent character set, sporting some bonuses such as native small capitals, ligatures, etc. But even the version of Arial in Windows 10 has a really large character set as well; it's still butt ugly though.

Speaking of which, it's a 20 year old article, but still one of the best takes on Arial:
https://www.marksimonson.com/noteboo...ourge-of-arial

Out of current Windows system fonts, I prefer the look of Georgia, Palatino Linotype and Constantia to Times New Roman.

Bahnschrift is the only typeface bundled in Windows 10 that is a Variable Font. It has two variable axis, weight and width. Bahnschrift looks like a German DIN typeface.

Microsoft bundled in a few more typefaces into Windows 10 than past versions of the OS. But I end up seeing so many weird combinations of typefaces like Calibri, Tahoma, Cambria, etc in documents created by non-designers that I usually just avoid them. The Mac OS and iPad OS have a better collection of pre-installed fonts.

I can't get by in my work just with the typefaces bundled in an operating system. The standards bar for newly released commercial typefaces is very high. Customers often expect type "super families" with dozens or even more than 100 font files in the family. Variable Fonts are growing in popularity. I like Variable Fonts in that they've revived the old Type 1 Multiple Master concept, but applied it in OpenType terms with much larger character sets.

I'm not sure if I would call it talent, but it does require a certain skill and sensibility to match 2 or more typefaces together in visually pleasing, compatible combinations. Some people have a good eye for it. Most do not. Some basic rules and guidelines can be taught, but in the end most skilled graphic designers have to use some gut instinct and some experimentation to arrive at a combination that has the right "feel" for the project and needs of the client.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Like Bobby indicated, for me, my "favorite" font really depends on usage scenario. Most people aren't even aware what kind of complexity awaits behind a seemingly banal thing like fonts...

I generally hate the Microsoft standard fonts, this includes Arial, which is a discount version of Helvetica. I also dislike Times New Roman, although this font was licensed from Monotype by Microsoft. Personally, I consider the serifs of Times New Roman much too fiddly for example. I much prefer a font like Garamond as a replacement for Times New Roman, which to me, looks much more elegant and better spaced, at least when it comes down to the Adobe version of the font. Calibri may be an exception to the rule, although by making it the standard font since Office 2007 has watered down the appeal of that font considerably as it's now being used for almost everything.

[Rick Raskin]

I use a serif font like Times New Roman for text and a sans-serif font like Calibri for captions. For the title of my newsletter, which is for a military service organization, I use Stencil. For consistency I like to stick to two fonts and maintain uniform scaling within the body of the publication.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't really have a "favorite" typeface. Although there are some type families I tend to use much more often in sign design work and other graphics projects because of their versatility and even neutrality. They work in combination with other typefaces more easily. Some graphics people nickname such typefaces as "work horse" type families.

Gotham was the first great typeface of the 2000's. I've used it somewhat frequently from the mid 2000's up until recent years but have grown tired of it. These days I'll use various weights and/or widths in the Gotham family because a company's branding dictates it for a project. Or nothing else works as well. I do use a number of alternatives that fit a similar purpose as Gotham, but with a touch more style going in a given direction. Avenir Next Pro or Futura Now are a couple examples.

These days I just try to keep my mind open when starting out on a project. I'll give a little more favor to a fresh, new commercial type family I bought recently as opposed to fonts I've had for years (or decades).

Some of the newest type families I'm using: Heading Now (by ZetaFonts), it's currently #1 on the MyFonts web site "Hot 50" chart. 160 OpenType fonts plus two OpenType Variable fonts that span all the Upright and Italic widths and weights. Proxima Vara (by Mark Simonson) is one OpenType Variable font with weight, width and italic axis sliders to allow 5 million combinations. CocoSharp (by ZetaFonts) is another recent buy. It has 60 OTFs plus 2 OTF Variable files. Each font has over 2000 glyphs. It's the first Variable Font I've seen that sports a variable x-height.

I'm always checking out the Adobe Fonts page to see what they've added to the service lately. They had 2362 commercial families hosted at last count. They recently added a ton of Chinese, Japanese and Korean Hangul fonts.

Helvetica (it is just an inspired font and darn near perfect for what it is). There are a couple of characters I don't like...such as "Q" but for the most part, it just deserves the praise it gets. It was my go-to font even when I did typeset.

Helvetica is one of those type families I use fairly often, but mainly because the nature of the project dictates it. Monotype released Helvetica Now a couple years ago. It has allowed me to like using Helvetica again. The Display weights are especially attractive; the line work is more graceful and elegant than the characters in the 1980's "Neue" cut and the more crude looking 1957 cut. Helvetica Now has a number of extended OpenType features, including some alternate characters that can give Helvetica a more stylized appearance.

Of course, I think we all know what Bobby Henderson's probably going to say is his preferred font

Trajan was never my "preferred font." Not sure what your roll-eyes emoji is about, especially when the reaction is to something I posted 19 years ago.

Trajan is a great looking typeface for certain titling designs, but it's a bad choice for general purpose use. When I wrote that post (and made that Trajan collage image) in 2002 Hollywood movie studio marketing departments had been binge-using Trajan throughout the 1990's going into that decade. Maybe some of the marketing people noticed my Film-Tech post or that Trajan image because all the Trajan over-use died down not too long after that. Or they just finally got tired of Trajan as a coincidence.

Ironically, better OpenType versions of Trajan exist now. The current version is Trajan Pro 3, available in 6 weights from Extra Light to Black. Adobe released a companion Trajan Sans family with 6 similar weights. And there is a OpenType-SVG Color version of Trajan. It comes bundled in recent "CC" versions of Photoshop. It has a very nice and natural looking prismatic bevel effect rendered in a variety of color choices.

[Marcel Birgelen]

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[Harold Hallikainen]

I assume everyone has seen the movie Helvetica ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica_(film) ). I am currently digging deeply into the font file format trying to figure out how the horizontal alignment of Japanese characters in vertical text is specified. I THINK I found it in the BASE table. Trying to get Japanese subtitles to display correctly.

Harold