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.

Increasing Tracking (Letter Spacing)

One of the easiest ways to make text more readable is to increase the spacing between the letters. This is called changing the tracking and it will especially helps make small text easier to read. Just don’t get too carried away or people will start to read a word as individual letters :-) Basically increasing the tracking just gives the typography more room to breath on the page so it appears lighter and not so bunched up. This is an especially common effect used with type on TV or in films. Increasing letter spacing can also be a nice way to make a piece of text, such as a title, stand out similar to applying a bold or italic effect. Give it a try and see how much cleaner a paragraph or line of text can look by simply increasing the overall letter spacing.

Decorative Fonts

I use to go crazy with decorative fonts. Why use a boring familiar font when there are so many more exciting options I figured. One of the first things I learned while studying graphic design however, was that decorative and crazy fonts need to be used sparingly. They have there place and can be effective at certain times but in general they are going make your design look less professional so it’s usually best to avoid them. Here are a few reasons why decorative fonts spell trouble for your designs:

1) They are hard to read – It’s just a fact that these fonts are more difficult for our eyes to recognize words and sentences. Since design is all about communication, you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you make it difficult for the words to be understood. You might be able to get away with this if you use the font sparingly but never use a crazy font for a large chunk of text.

2) They draw to much attention to themselves – Yes, you want your design to attract attention and stand out but a decorative font can distract from your message and what the words actually say. A good design will attract attention through other more subtle means.

3) They rarely are well designed – Fonts themselves are actually designed and it’s pretty safe to say that 99% of all the decorative fonts out there are poorly designed. Well designed fonts are built to be quietly pleasing to the eye and usually have similarities or patterns that can be seen throughout there characters which make the text seem well balanced.

4) They quickly tell people that you’re not a professional – Think about it. How many big time adds and marketing items have you seen with decorative fonts? Using crazy fonts is more or less just a cheap trick to try to make something look more exciting then it is and it usually screams out that the rest of the design can’t stand on its own.

As you can see it’s normally best to stick with fonts that are well established and time tested. Helvetica Neue, Baskerville, Futura, and Garamond are some great examples and there are plenty of others that I’ll cover in later entries. As a general rule just be sure your design doesn’t rely on the font to attract attention and you’re designs will look much more professional.