Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career | Hacker News Reader

Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career

blog.spoongraphics.co.uk

128 pointsdwwoelfel69 comments

What a weak post. I'm going to spend a career alternating between Helvetica and Akzidenz? Clarendon (really?) and Rockwell? Why? Why would a designer ever use "Avant Garde"? What's the last major thing to ever use Optima?

Some of these faces seem terribly out of fashion (Optima, Rotis, Clarendon). Some of them seem useful only if you're going to set printed books (Bembo, Garamond). Some of them are so closely related (Akzidenz and Helvetica, Univers Avenir and Frutiger) that it's hard to see why all of them are here.

But what really bugs me about this post is that it contains no content. Choose whatever faces you want; you're supposedly the expert, blog writer! Just tell us something about them when you do.

> What's the last major thing to ever use Optima?

> Some of these faces seem terribly out of fashion (Optima, Rotis).

The 2008 McCain/Palin campaign used Optima.

Seriously, not snarkily: case in point. Their visual identity was ridiculed during the campaign (Obama's campaign famously used HF+J Gotham, which has since become a design cliche because of overuse by designers).

How can you tell? Are you able to tell what a typeface is just by looking at it? What characteristics help you decide ?

I have been trying to learn about typography, passively, for the past couple months. Anything sans serif looks like Helvetica to me.

Optima is a very famous typeface. It's probably the most famous humanist sans --- these are faces that try to capture the quirks of handwriting or calligraphy. The uppercase letters mimic carved-in-stone Roman letters. Because it has serif-y features (flared terminals in particular) it's notoriously hard to harmonize with other faces. Every designer in the world can spot it on sight.

In general, look at the contrast in weights (where do the lines get thinner and thicker) and the axis of those contrasts (is the "hand" drawing the letter positioned at an angle?). In a Sans, you can also eyeball how "geometric" the letters are; is the "o" a perfect circle, for instance?

Even if you're not a designer (I'm definitely not), it's worth it to buy a copy of Bringhurst's _Elements of Typography_; it's a beautifully written and designed little book.

nod Can't recommend Robert Bringhurst's 'The Elements of Typographic Style'[1] enough. 'A Short History of the Printed Word' is also good, but I've found the former to be indispensable.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Sty...

Thanks for the heads up with that book... I was wondering if there was a K&R for typography.

Robert Bringhurst's book is fantastic, but if you're starting off, I recommend James Fellici's "Manual of Typographic Style."

Getting to know typefaces is much like getting to know any other visual art - some distinctions are highly visible and obvious (modernist versus baroque, punk versus techno) while others are more subtle (folk-pop versus folk-rock) due to the general shifting and swirling of aesthetic trends.

If you're really interested in identifying typefaces, get at least conversationally familiar with the technical terms for different parts of letterforms: serifs, bowls, counters, shoulders, etc.: http://www.fontshop.com/glossary/ Look at instances of typefaces you see around you, try and identify the different parts and see if any of them are particularly notable.

Some of the more obvious things I've learned: The bowl of Palatino's P doesn't quite meet the stem, unlike most other serif faces. Optima's strokes have a gentle concavity to them, unlike most other sans-serif faces. Gill Sans tends to be wider than the Platonic sans-serif face, and the tips of C and G are sliced off with a vertical stroke, leaving quite pointy terminals behind. Helvetica's most famous birthmarks are the surprisingly complete tail on the lowercase a (compare to Arial's a) and the surreal curly tail on R.

Of course, some typefaces are even more subtle than that. If you showed me Baskerville and Times New Roman, I could probably tell you which was which, even if I couldn't identify Baskerville on its own. Distinguishing between the hundreds of typefaces in the Bodoni/Didot genre is way beyond me.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about typography, I heartily recommend picking up a copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst - if you're a practicing graphic designer, it's got lots of useful information; if you're not, it's a book by a typographer with decades of experience who also happens to be a well-known poet, writing about something he's passionately interested in, so you know it's going to be a good read.

Thanks for the link...

I like walking around the mall after a day of work and examining the typefaces used in all the store windows. I am a programmer first, so its probably pretty boring to the average designer. For me, its like there is this whole new world [typography] that I didn't know existed. I always thought it was "just words", much like how I thought cooking was "just following a recipe" (Cooking is my other personal interest outside of coding).

Typographers can tell. For others, there are sites such as http://new.myfonts.com/ and http://www.identifont.com/identify.html. I own a printed variant of such a tool: the book "The Typefinder". Far from being an expert, I do not know whether it is any good (google learns me that it has a foreword by Frutiger, so It cannot be really bad), but I find it entertaining and educational. Among other information, it gives the most distinctive characters for each type, with arrows and dotted lines pointing out what to look for.

"Why would a designer ever use "Avant Garde"?"

I worked on a web project recently that used Avant Garde in the branding. I have never had so much difficulty trying to make body type hang with branding. Anyway, I came across this quote:

"The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde …" http://www.thinkingforaliving.org/archives/147

Guy I worked with used it pretty successfully for Trek. It's a difficult font, but it's not inherently evil like Optima, Comic Sans or Papyrus.

I don't think any fonts are inherently evil... it's the people that use them you have to watch out for ;-)

How is Optima inherently evil? Used properly (e.g. printed at high resolution on glossy paper for some art book, or printed letterpress) it’s absolutely gorgeous.

I quite like FontShop.de’s list of best fonts (http://www.100besteschriften.de/), it has much more diversity and interesting background information for every font that made the list.

Sales numbers (40%), history (30%) and aesthetics (30%) were criteria, the usual limitation of those kinds of lists apply and FontShop is obviously a commercial operation. Oh, and it seems like the list is still only available in German which is unfortunate. Last I heard (three years ago) FontShop.com was supposed to put a translated version up but it seems they never have. They have the domain (http://100bestfonts.com/) so it might still happen.

But for what it's worth, that's a totally different kind of list. Optima and Gill Sans (but definitely not Eurostile and Rotis) probably are two of the greatest typefaces of all time, but that doesn't mean a design that relies on them won't look terribly dated and tired.

Some faces (Helvetica Univers) are probably timeless. Others, like Futura, speak clearly to a different era, and manage to be evocative without being retro. But a lot of these typefaces are neither of those good things.

You won’t become Timbaland with a list of the 100 best pop songs of all time and you won’t become a great designer with a list of the 100 best typefaces of all time.

But there are good lists of career workhorse typefaces, and they don't look like either of these lists.

What a weak post... this post is that it contains no content

I think the choice of fonts in the list was driven but what was available with affiliate links.

"What's the last major thing to ever use Optima?"

For starters:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marks_%26_Spencer

"Marks & Spencer (M&S) is a major British retailer, with over 895 stores in more than 40 territories around the world, over 600 domestic and 295 international.[3][4] The company, with its head office in the Waterside House in the City of Westminster, London, England,[5][6] is the largest clothing retailer in the United Kingdom, as well as being an upmarket food retailer, and as of 2008, the 43rd largest retailer in the world.[7] Most of its domestic stores sell both clothing and food, and since the turn of the century it has started expanding into other ranges such as homewares, furniture and technology."

http://www.shoppingnsales.com/wp-content/uploads/marks-spenc...

Maybe you are just more creative than the regular designers... but most of the best designers I know (people who made graphic design history) use even just a fraction of these typefaces.

I wouldn't place myself anywhere close the level of those designers, but if I look at the works I've done (I'm mostly designer) in the past two years, I can say in 90% of them I used one of those fonts. For the remaining 10% I mostly used Museo and few others.

That, plus the fact that "Din", "Dax" and "Cocon" look terrible. Up there with Mistral in the "instantly dated" category.

I don't think it was a great article by any stretch, but you're sounding really foolish.

Helvetica and Akzidenz (and Universe/Avenir/Frutiger, Clarendon/Rockwell) are plenty different. And yes, there are designers that spend their careers alternating between a few similar typefaces. Just because two typefaces have similarities doesn't mean they both can't be useful in different situations.

Clarendon was recently chosen by Pitchfork, purveyors of cool, for their logo. Ruby Tuesday also went through a rebrand with Clarendon within the last year or two. Wells Fargo does fine with it. Modest Mouse and Belle and Sebastian have used it on album covers. Typography is subjective, but what exactly is your problem with it? It's very clearly still relevant.

"Why would a designer ever use Avant Garde"

That's a pretty ignorant statement. If you look at the portfolios of mondernist designers from the last 5 years, Avant Garde would probably appear as often as anything but Helvetica.

I'd expect that someone delivering such harsh criticism would at least be an expert on the subject, but I went to the Matasano homepage and found a hodgepodge of 4 or 5 different sans-serifs, sloppy tracking and leading...no wonder.

Are you commenting on my taste in typography (trust me, mine is worse than the web site for my software security company, which I didn't do[1]), or the post?

(You've got me dead to rights on Avant Garde, but I don't think your case is as solid with Clarendon; isn't Pitchfork using it ironically? Clearly Ruby Tuesday is.)

My criticism is about the post. You clearly could write an excellent post like this, and you should. This author didn't. There's no context to any of its selections. There's no information about any of its selections. Some of them (Univers/Avenir/Frutiger, Helvetica/Akzidenz) seem suspect because they're too similar. "Here I've made a collection of every face I've seen used on Underconsideration.com, added 1 sentence to each, and started soaking up the link juice".

You can beat up on me --- an avowed non-designer --- all you want, but I'm not the one getting articles like this flung to the top of Google's search results for cash.

[1] I wouldn't beat up on our designers too much, since we (a) gave them a wordmark set in Avenir to work with and (b) very haphazardly converted their output to Haml/Sass. Believe me when I say that the people who pay us don't care that much.

I'm not really commenting on your taste or the article, but the manner in which you criticized the article. I agree that the article lacked substance and isn't deserving of so many upvotes. However, your comments about specific fonts were made in a matter-of-fact way that suggested you were a designer or typography expert. It gets a bunch of upvotes, and the programmers on here come away from the comments thinking that Clarendon and Avant Garde are irrelevant, etc., when the truth might be the opposite. My comment regarding your website was only to make the point that, suspect as the OP might be, your comments should be taken with a grain of salt as well.

Yeah, not so fast, font geek. Defend your argument.

Seriously, you think Clarendon is a great "back pocket", "top of my tool drawer" typeface for designers to be using? Because Pitchfork and Ruby Tuesday use it? Put a bevel on Ruby Tuesday's mark and you could add a cowboy hat and a lasso to complete their thought.

Is there a Clarendon revival I'm missing, or are you just jumping on me because you think I'm bashing the typefaces and not the author of this post? You obviously are an expert, and should have no trouble setting me straight.

Seriously, you think Clarendon is a great "back pocket", "top of my tool drawer" typeface for designers to be using?

If I'm theoretically limited to only 25 typefaces, there should be room for a few slab-serifs, and I don't see why Clarendon couldn't be one of them. It's a classic slab-serif in the same way that Helvetica and Akzidenz are classic sans-serifs. I don't think it's great because Pitchfork and Ruby Tuesday use it, I'm saying that it's more relevant than you suggested. Designers, somehow, ARE using it.

Maybe there is a Clarendon revival. Don't forget that trends are a big part of graphic design, as they are in any design industry. Helvetica, Avant Garde, Clarendon go in and out of style just like tapered jeans, Ray-Bans, and plaid shirts.

And in 25 typefaces with a few slab serifs, you'd do Clarendon before Archer, PMN Caecilia (best ital ever), Joanna, or Chaparral? More to the point --- bringing it back to the post --- if the other slab you were stuck with was Rockwell, you'd use Clarendon as your backup? Two faces that would both look at home on a WPA-era wrought iron factory gate?

What parts of my criticism are wrong? I'm sure there's lots wrong, and I'm happy to be called out, as long as I'm going to learn something from it.

That's a purely subjective matter. I might like the typefaces you mentioned more than Clarendon, but I don't think it's absurd for someone to think Clarendon is a good one to have. Why did Pitchfork and Wells Fargo and Ruby Tuesday choose Clarendon instead of those fonts? I'm not sure, maybe they just decided it was a better fit. Erik Spiekermann thinks Helvetica is terrible — is he right? I don't know...some people love it.

Maybe Clarendon and Rockwell are redundant in the context of the article, but you said that Clarendon was "terribly out fashion", and "really?". That's what I was responded to.

The parts of your criticism that are wrong are the ones that are either not based in reality, or personal opinions stated as fact.

It's funny to me, because I originally wrote (Optima, Rotis) and re-read the post 5 minutes later after re-reading the post and edited Clarendon onto the list. I went out of my way to annoy you! I may have an irrational hatred of Clarendon.

Glad to hear we may agree about Rotis, though.

Uncrate's logo (http://uncrate.com) is set in Clarendon. :)

"I wouldn't beat up on our designers too much, since we gave them a wordmark set in Avenir to work with."

What's wrong with Avenir? There's nothing wrong with that typeface and it's just plain weird to try blame it for why Matasano's home page is a super wordy giant wall of text.

I inherited a logo set in Avenir at the day gig, so we used Cufón to work it into the rest of the site and whatever else you might say about it, you probably wouldn't call our stuff undesigned:

http://isocket.com

I wonder if I'm the only one here who is completely font-blind? I never notice what font something is unless someone points it out, let alone being able to pick out 25 specific ones. I guess that makes me a poor candidate for being a designer, doesn't it!

no, it's a learned skill. Mostly you get better at it by a) using them and b) reading about them. It took me about two years of minor curiosity and looking up at things before i definitively spotted my first random non-system font.

The key, and this is important, fonts have historical baggage and they also are designed by relatively few people. After doing this, you start to see designer-traits and also historical influences. The hardest thing to see is white-space, which is another "i know kung fu" moment.

Alas, typography is cursed by two common afflications in the design community:

1. Good typography does not draw attention to itself. Most people will only notice your typographical work when you get it wrong. When you get it right, the reader takes in the information and registers the mood without ever noticing the medium.

2. There are snobs, who will artificially exaggerate the differences between fonts to try to appear more knowledgeable. There are differences between fonts and they really can create very different results. However, sometimes there are two well-designed fonts that happen to be very similar, and you really could use either with good, professional-looking results. Arguing about which of these fonts is "better" invariably generates more heat than light.

In other words, if you're not a trained designer, you're supposed to be font-blind. And if you are a trained designer, your reader should be font-blind. If they are noticing the details of which font you use, you're probably not doing a very good job.

I always compare this to football (or 'soccer') fans who always seem to know an impossibly large amount on the subject compared to me. I guess it's just what you're in to — I suppose the same goes for music and movies.

As a designer I'm tired of seeing this post(10th time now?) Which is always directly "borrowed" from this book... http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Typefaces-Lifetime-Joshua-Be...

Which I have owned for, god I dont even remember how long. Dont defend these typefaces to deeply. They come with almost every computer today, so they are accessible to almost everyone (maybe mircosoft decided to catch up?). Which is why they are good for a lifetime.

Right now there are many contemporary type foundries putting out some really beautiful typefaces. Like these guys. http://processtypefoundry.com/

Thats all. peace.

I really love Mark Simonson's fonts. Anonymous Pro is a great fixed-width font, and I really like Proxima Nova and Mostra Nuova. I'd much rather give him my money than Adobe.

I recommend Bringhurst's Elements of Typographical Style as a crash course in typography.

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Brin...

It contains wonderful guidelines for typesetting and also gives a sense of history and culture behind common fonts.

Also useful is this site that outlines how to apply Bringhurst's principles to the web:

http://webtypography.net/

Content-void topX list with affliate links.

There is no justification for any of these fonts. He could've simply spun the wheel'o fonts and picked 25 of these. Most fonts have a real designer behind them that designed the font for a reason. The font depicts a mood and should be used for specific situations. This just makes it seem like you should pick any font of your choosing and run wild with it.

Since there are 25 I surely can't run out right?

How could you make a list like that and omit HFJ's Gotham in favor of FF Dax or Myriad?

Many of these are roughly equivalent. Terrible list.

A few seconds of searching turns up an infinitely more interesting piece from Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/20/60-brilliant-type...

Gotham has been used so much in the past couple years that I'd be very wary of using it for anything. In ten years it'll immediately scream '2009'.

It very well may. I point it out because it seems to be becoming a default, just as Helvetica has.

I generally agree a lot with professional designers about typography (well, apart from the rabid Helvetica lovers among them), but sometimes I wonder whether compromising for the tastes of the general public wouldn't be worth it in monetary terms. The proliferation of Comic Sans and Papyrus doesn't come out of nowhere, and if you walk around in a random city in this world (with Latin signage), you're bound to see lots of those signs. I have a friend who works in a print shop, and apparently a lot of customers prefer to have that.

So depending on your desired projected image, you might want to go with the typographically "bad" choice, for psychological reasons. I wonder whether real designers regard this with the same distaste as I would about copy & paste programming…

I don’t think Comic Sans and Papyrus are popular because people prefer them to choices a designer would make. They are popular because they are readily available. Normal people pick a font by looking at the font dropdown in Word. You actually have to pay a lot of money for most fonts on the submission’s list.

A lot of good could be done for this world by operating systems with better default fonts.

Windows and Mac do have better fonts available, so that can't be the sole reason. What both fonts have in common, is that they don't look professional. So they are intended to convey a different mood by their user – which gets somewhat ironic when you consider the amount of passive-agressive notes written in Comic Sans.

Just like deliberate spelling mistakes (flickr, tumblr etc.) are used to convey a certain non-chalance, using "bad" fonts might be used as a tool. It's probably not good for long-standing branding, but for cheap one-off mass market communication, it might fly. Personally, I probably wouldn't, but then again, I'm one of those who considers sans-serif fonts necessary evils in this low-DPI world, not much more.

There aren’t really any alternatives to Comic Sans or Papyrus on Windows. Everything else looks awful when printed (Verdana) or is, if somewhat more – ehem – professional than Comic Sans, not exactly very emotional (Times New Roman).

They always had Arial. But that is even more formal, as we're used to sans-serif fonts in signage. If you want to inform someone of the fact that there are cookies in the kitchen, you don't want to present it in the visual equivalent of a German border guard.

But never mind what's the original reason, now people are used to these bad fonts. A corner cafe using Papyrus, birthday invitations using Comic Sans… My point is that you could harness that history if you want to advertise your business on the web. Will it be good typography? Nope. Will it sell more than a golden ratio Bodoni layout? Possibly.

Comic Sans is often used quite deliberately to give an air of unprofessionalism/cheapness. I suspect that Papyrus is more often used in a misguided attempt to look arty or historic and would probably get significantly less use with better default fonts.

Well, Comic Sans is a poor excuse for a hand-lettered font, and there are a zillion better out there, even if most lay people are unaware of them. Papyrus, though, is a gorgeous font (a modified Carolingian with caps and a distressed effect) that is the righteous choice when used correctly. Like anything that looks simple on the surface, though, people are going to copy the wrong thing when they try to duplicate someone else's success. Papyrus can figure strongly in a successful design, but it's rarely the font alone that makes a design work.

Comic Sans would be an ok choice for comic lettering, you know, what its name kind of implies.

Even then, it's limited to a kind of "cramped technical pen" lettering that would be expected in alternative or underground comics. There are other comic book fonts that would be more broadly applicable.

Anime Ace is a particular favorite of mine for speech bubbles and narrative blocks. Badaboom works well for in-panel sound effects. There are many others, but those two remind me most of my Marvel childhood. (I has Spidey #1 and Hulk #1. They cost a dime at the time, and who the hell knew they'd be worth anything? Same with my Bobby Orr rookie cards -- I traded a bunch of them away for proper Leaf players, and wound up putting the last one in the spokes of my bike the next season.)

Inspired by the lettering for Watchmen, if I remember correctly. Which is why I found the font itself much more palatable, you just have to read everything printed with it in Rohrschach's voice.

Yes, it's supposedly inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, which are both excellent books. However, the letter shapes of those two books are closer to each other than they are to Comic Sans. It seems the font creator relied more on his intuition of how comic letters should look than on observation. There's a good comparison of the three fonts here:

http://kleinletters.com/Blog/?p=3599

Viewers don't recognize the font that something's in. At most, they might recognize the feeling that the font gives them, but that's probably a subconscious reaction as well. Consider the situation in which someone sends an important and serious email, but uses Comic Sans for the text. The same font would work for a birthday party invitation, but since the font doesn't support the context of the communication it comes across as foolish.

I've been trying to get into design more, but I apparently don't have any innate talent and I'm going to have to actually work hard at it.

Anyone got any tips/articles/etc on how to pick a typeface?

Yeah, that's a pretty broad question... I've tried going by my feelings, and that only goes so far with no innate ability. I can recognize some as looking 'classy' or 'fun', but anything more fine-tuned than that eludes me so far.

"... I apparently don't have any innate talent and I'm going to have to actually work hard at it."

Unfortunately even with innate talent you will still have to work hard at it. There are many things to consider, from fitting in with the style and purpose of the project (Mrs Eaves is pretty but would you use Mrs Eaves on a project about the Titanic?) to practical issues like having the right weights for body type.

  "even with innate talent you will still have to work hard at it."

Word. I responded to an earlier post that this sort of thing is a learned skill. About a year or two ago, i started a font blog[1] so that i could learn about typefaces and also so that i could become better at making type specimens.

It worked, at least until i got busy with school, but it actually made me understand type and it also had the effect of making me use typeface outside of my comfort zone. I welcome submissions, so let me know if you want to take a stab at writing up a typeface / specimen.

Just as with programming or, for that matter, anything, practice in seeing[2] and using type is really the winning ticket. The more you do it, the better you get. I know, lame, right? But how do you get better? You research, you try, you fail, you get feedback, and you get better.

[1] http://fontasm.tumblr.com [2] Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (978-0520049208)

> http://fontasm.tumblr.com

Subscribed.

Tips on how to pick a typeface? Research further into the history of typography and current usage.

Generally there are 'safe' options for instance, in my opinion, you can rarely go wrong with Helvetica.

It is probably more about the actual setting of the type - sizes, line spacing, layout and so on. I would suggest focusing on and practicing with that more than focusing on actual typefaces.

Read more design-y blogs/magazines such as Brand New and Creative Review than just web orientated blogs such as the one linked here.

These are all fine faces with (mostly) very rigid licenses around them. If your design career was online - the chances of you able to easily use any of them in a meaningful way is nil. There are some great faces released under the OFL, GPL, and CC licenses.

Remember, most of these won't look so good as body copy on the web: http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/design-for-hackers-why-you-...

The complete lack of any mention of printer's ornaments (pi fonts) or specialty fonts (chess anyone?) suggests that 'Career' doesn't even begin to cover edge cases. Which of course leaves the land of hum-drum in the middle--- no thanks!

No need for specialty fonts for chess since all chess pieces are in Unicode:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode

I'm going to take a wild guess that not all fonts include all Unicode characters.

I could use one font in my whole design career, though it would be an awefully short one if I did!

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