Popular sans serif typefaces
José Scaglione and Veronika Burian, 2009. No style, no nuance, just blunt, in-your-face, straightforward attitude.” Michael Bierut described it as “The ultimate ‘I don’t give a damn” typeface. Also designed to work well with FF Unit and FF Unit Slab. The serif companion to Eric Spiekermann’s influential sans serif, FF Meta. Created for the American Type Founders Company and named after Benjamin Franklin.Įrik Spiekermann, Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby, 2007. Designed out of a dissatisfaction with the san serifs of the time like Futura.
Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.” Massimo Vingelli And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. “You can say, ‘I love you,’ in Helvetica. Helvetica needs no introduction as the planet’s most famous typeface-it even inspired a very good film. Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann, 1957. Some modern interpretations of Baskerville have been reproduced following the designs of a specific size, resulting in several distinct versions. His typefaces were both admired (notably by Giambattista Bodoni and Benjamin Franklin) and criticised by his competitors.īaskerville made variations of his typeface for use at different sizes (now referred to as ‘optical sizes’). Baskerville designed his own type to improve his printed works and better the dominant fonts of William Caslon. It’s a standard that I strive for in my own work” Mark Simonson Currently used on YouTube’s homepage logo. Designed for the American Typefounders Company (ATF). “The original grotesque and still the best.” Vincent Connare The first widely used sans serif typeface. Gave rise to a printer’s saying ‘When in doubt, use Caslon’. ( William Caslon I, 1722) Carol Twombly, 1990. The subtlety of line and detail are simply remarkable.” Robert Slimbach Of the various roman and italic sizes that he cut, I feel his Vraye Parangonne font (about 18 pt.) best captures the essence of his vision. “Garamond was quite the master who appreciated restraint as much as elegance. 1480–1561), Several derivatives of the Parisian punch cutter’s design have been chosen, including ITC Garamond (Tony Stan), Adobe Garamond & Garamond Premier (Robert Slimbach). A quintessential British design produced under the direction of Stanley Morison at Monotype. It remains one of the most distinctive blends of humanist and geometric shapes. It was a real modern typeface, not based on existing serif typefaces”.
“Paul Renner’s Future characterised his time and influenced many other designers. This immortal ‘modern’ typeface with its uncompromising shapes has become the benchmark geometric sans for almost 80 years.
“Scala and Scala San are just about perfect.” John Boardley FontShop International’s ‘first serious text face’. “Each character just feels ‘normal’ and ‘right’”. Famously used for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. “A gorgeous technical achievement.” Jason Santa Maria It’s a sturdy yet friendly typeface, with a wonderful flowing italic, that features on millions of websites. Georgia has a large x-height and ascenders that rise above the cap height. Originally designed for clarity on low resolution screens, for Microsoft, it is the counterpart to Verdana, which also appears in this list. The top 10 designers’ favourite fonts will be quite familiar to many but hopefully the full list will provide a useful stepping stone to exploring many more. We’ve counted the number of times each typeface was selected and found consensus with the top 25. In each issue of 8 Faces magazine we asked eight leading designers from the fields of typography, lettering and type design itself: If you could use just eight typefaces, which would you choose? Over four years and across eight issues we interviewed 64 world-renowned designers, including Erik Spiekermann, Jessica Hische, Michael Bierut, Nina Stössinger, Mark Simonson Seb Lester, plus owners of respected type foundries such as, Font Smith, Type Together and Process Type. Wouldn’t it be great to start with a short list of typefaces, hand-picked by designers in the type industry? There are some excellent guides on how to choose a typeface and helpful methods for pairing typefaces but in order to apply these principles it’s important to be familiar with a broad range of quality typefaces. But with over 100,000 font families to pick from it can be a daunting task. Selecting the right typeface makes all the difference to effective design and communication.