Fonts: List of my favorites

Occasionally people will ask me what fonts they should use. My advice is to try to use well established fonts whenever possible. In fact in school one of my teachers really pushed us to only work with one or two fonts in all our projects for one semester. Frequently working with the same font really helps you discover it's strengths and weaknesses and helps you get a feel for what you can do with it. Now before I started seriously looking at becoming a designer I loved to use crazy decorative fonts and there are literally thousands of them out there. I thought they looked pretty cool at the time but now looking back at them I see that most of them were really quite hideous. They usually stand out from the design like a sore thumb and draw more attention to the font it self then to the message being delivered. Plus using in using these crazy fonts I tended to lean on them as a way to make the design look good. The truth of the matter is a good design will look pleasing to the eye with a very simple font. Of course there are the rare occasions where I end up using a decorative font here or there but they are pretty rare. I've listed the fonts I use most often on the side and they include: BaseNine, Baskerville, Bodoni, Caslon 540, City, Clarendon, DIN Engschrift, Franklin Gothic, Franklin Gothic Condensed, Futura, Garamond 3, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica Neue Black, Helvetica Neue Condensed, Shelly Volante, Snell Roundhand, Times New Roman, Trajan and Verdana. There are other good fonts but if you stick with these time tested standards and try to avoid immediately grabbing the newest flashy font, your designs will look a lot more professional.