Typefaces

[Britalian]

Tangential to and prompted by Labelking's typewriter thread I was wondering why I like the futura and arial typefaces. Maybe it's their cleanliness and lack of serifs. They are easy for me to read, particularly the latter. Size 14.

What are others default typefaces and reasons for the choices.

 

[LabelKing]

What kind of a font is this?

 

[Britalian]

The alphabet would suggest either News Gothic MT or Geneva. A better close up of the letter 'K' would be required.
I suspect it's not present on my Mac .

 

[StevenRocks]

I like the purity of Helvetica and Futura. Arial doesn't do it for me.

 

[DocHolliday]

For display type, I like the Bodoni family. So retro it hurts.

Onyx MT is A+ too, when played big.

 

[LabelKing]

Originally Posted by Britalian

The alphabet would suggest either News Gothic MT or Geneva. A better close up of the letter 'K' would be required.
I suspect it's not present on my Mac .
Yes, the typewriter company called it "Double Gothic". It's a distinctly '50s, '60s font.

 

[faustian bargain]

I usually use Verdana, sometimes Tahoma, for on-screen proportional fonts. for fixed-width, I use Courier New.

**edit -
many of the popular TrueType fonts are designed primarily for print, and just don't read well on a monitor, IMO

 

[Joffrey]

I found sylfaen a few days back and its my font of the moment.


Oh and Bookman old style

 

[designprofessor]

Bodoni is my classic favorite.

Gill Sans

I actually use alot of Microsoft Sans

I used to do paintings that were mainly text oriented-
I came to appreciate Times New Roman -boring to almost everybody, but truly a workhorse of a font.

 

[faustian bargain]

oh yes, forgot about Gill Sans. Truly a great font. The Tufte books are perfect exemplars of its use.

Don't see it used much on the computer screen though - It doesn't seem to have made the transition very well. Maybe I've missed something...is there another version made for on-screen use?

 

[designprofessor]

Originally Posted by faustian bargain

oh yes, forgot about Gill Sans. Truly a great font. The Tufte books are perfect exemplars of its use.

Don't see it used much on the computer screen though - It doesn't seem to have made the transition very well. Maybe I've missed something...is there another version made for on-screen use?

I don't see it applied much anywhere.
If you have ever seen any of the original drawings ofr the letterforms
that Eric Gill did before the letters were cut, they are really quite cool!

 

[AlanC]

Originally Posted by designprofessor

I don't see it applied much anywhere.
If you have ever seen any of the original drawings ofr the letterforms
that Eric Gill did before the letters were cut, they are really quite cool!
Gill's stuff is very nice. I have several of his books, including a nice one with his font drawings.

Anyone a fan of Victor Hammer's work? I'm also quite fond of Bruce Rogers' Centaur.

 

[Brian SD]

My favorite faunts are Sauna, Kontrapunkt, Futura (of course), Univers, and Electra

I am really not a fan of Helvetica at all.

 

[Matt]

I use a lot of Tahoma because it is a decent compromise between looking good and working in Vietnamese characters - a lot of fonts get all twisted and convoluted when all the accent marks get applied. Tahoma seems to hold up OK.

Also - since it is on basically every computer - if we email documents around in Unicode - it wont turn into this weird mishmash of zeroes and slashes etc.

This is really important since international clients like to file press releases etc even though they cannot read them, and are apt to forward them around not realising the problems (since they cant read it anyhow).

 

[countdemoney]

Typography is a beautiful and special art. I like Frutiger.