October 18, 2005

• Also I checked one of my books and realized that a couple of years ago Palatino flowed so poorly I decided to toss it out. I ended up doing the second edition in another typeface; I can't find the PDF but I believe it may have been Garamond. So strike Palatino off the list; I'm not sure what I'd use it for.
• Bodoni and Sabon are very legible, classic faces. More streamlined ones I like are Meta, Myriad, Trebuchet and my favorite, Frutiger. Of course, if it's some academic title full of footnotes and such, Hot Tamale would be a *great* choice ;) Ewww, I hate Optima. Specially for body text.
• I'd like to cast my vote for Comic Sans. Everybody loves Comic Sans. It screams gravitas.
• YES, all comic sans all the time!
• No, ban comic sans!
• how about the 20 Best License Free Fonts? (via lifehacker)
• Love Garamond. Hate Helvetica. Does anyone like Helvetica?
• Jensen, Bembo, Horley Old Style. Jensen especially. Beautifully inconspicous. NOTHING SANS-SERIF I would shy away from Optima, which is a serifless roman, meaning it has variation in line width but no serifs. Incidentally, it an Palatino were designed by the same guy.
• Sans serif faces such as Helvetica are harder to read because they contain fewer visual cues due to their simplicity. They were originally designed for extremely limited applications (captions and so forth). Trebuchet is good on screen but avoidable in small text sizes in print. Frutiger is basically an older version of Univers (by Adrian Frutiger) and not really suitable for body text. Garamond would work too. It comes down to a matter of kerning with a lot of these. Bodoni is a bit old fashioned but it's extremely handsome and readable.
• Wait what about Palatino is angular and geometric? It is modern roman brush inspired script (look at the uppercase P). It's not as geometric as, say, Trajan or something, but hey.
• As Settle says above, be VERY wary of using any sans-serif font for large print jobs. Unless you have a very specific aesthetic end which it serves, sans-serif fonts have been shown to decrease the average reading speed of the reader over a longer period of time. And I vote Garamond. It's a nice, strong font in print, and its slightly aggresive serifs convey a more authoritative feeling, which I think may give your non-fiction book a very slight subliminally persuasive edge.
• What do you all think of Sabon that flagpole suggested? I tried it and I think it's kind of spiffy, in a Garamond-esque way. BTW my last Optima job was 7 years ago... I definitely don't plan to use it in any body text again. I also read some crappy 1980s-era books that were set in it, so maybe I'm biased, too.
• Oh... Sabon.
• Does anyone like Helvetica? A typesetter I used to work with was well known for saying, "nobody has ever been fired for choosing Helvetica." She'd say it for a few others too, acknowledging the needs for a nice serif font and such. But the point was you could have your career run off just a couple of safe and effective fonts. She had pool of about ten she worked from and I eventually learned the same. She really taught me the value of not spending time looking for the next new Latest and Greatest font and instead taking an ol' trusty and setting it really well. After this revelation I learned all the Quark keyboard shortcuts for kerning and would fix up every line by hand. Even though I was using the worlds most boring fonts I constantly was complemented on how beautiful and easy reading my pages were. On a related note: Are fonts eligible for copyright protection?
• Trebuchet has always been my favorite for on-screem, though I agree that when it's small it can be difficult. Sabon looks pretty, ver clear but with style to it. Minion isn't bad either. I remember we used Georgia in my HS newspaper, and everbody hated it, except the advisor.
• *on-screen *very sorry, having hardships in dorm-land.
• Jensen is OK, but my fav is Janson.
• Here's a link to a Before & After Magazine PDF article on this very subject - What's the right typeface for text? (I highly recommend the bamagazine.com site to anyone that occasionally has to dabble in design. Their articles are well written and very understandable. As for Helvetica - the artists at work use it all the freaking time. I'm tired of it myself, although I can understand why we'd use it so much (car ads and the like, with all that fine print). We've got a bajillion different Helvetica variants available to us. It works for quite a few things... although easily readable copy is not one of them.
• Sabon is, as previously mentioned, very nice - Baskerville (the old classical one as opposed to the modern variants) is probably my fave though.
• prismatic7: Nice link!
• Fontaholic? I have over 500 fonts on my machine. In fact I may have much more than that, that's just an estimate. You have no idea the problems I have choosing which one to use in a rare photoshop or something. I just love fonts. All these ones mentioned I have, and none of them really blow me away. I like Casablanca.
• Heh... I have 1200 fonts, though after my last OS reinstall I pared it down to about 50 installed fonts to keep things sane. Lots of great ideas here, esp. the B&A article which recommended Adobe Caslon, Adobe Garamond, ITC Stone Serif, and Janson Text 55 Roman. Interesting since last night I was trying to compare Caslon and Garamond and couldn't see much difference.
• Well I have A BONGZILLION of fonts and my penis is THIS BIG.
• That's about 2cm on my screen, BTW.
• At 72 or 96 dpi?
• Dicks per inch? Go font yourself.
• Actually I have 800 fonts. And they're all installed because I'm not afraid. And my penis is muuuuuuch bigger than any of youse. And I drank the bongzillion water.
• Weelll... I've got Sony, JVC, and Toshiba working to find a way to capture the full splendor of my penis. They invented HDTV, but I said, "Nice try. Back to work, boys."
• I've got TEN BILLION BILLION BILLION MILLION TRILLION penises and each one can pee-pee in a different font.
• Um, I hate to interrupt the pee pee fest, but you are all aware, are you not, that these are all Times New Roman? "I personally like Boobyfoot font" (No you don't! It's Times New Roman! Ha! Ha!) Me, I'll take a fine sans-serif any day over that serif crap. Serif is too dry, too mediciny for me.
• Tell that to the Romans.
• "Weleathe Bigguth Quiduth!"
• The point is, as already said before here, that sans-serifs are harder to read in big masses of text. For ad copy, posters or short brochures/flyers and such, they're OK, but for long, maybe a little dry academic subjects, you want serifs so your gaze doesn't unfocus while studying. Heck, I like Aero, Futura, Eras, GilSans and even some of those wacky House or Emigre fonts for headlines, but copy needs to be more 'traditional'.
• I wonder why that is. *notices that the comment box is serif and the postings sans-serif*
• Heh... I have 1200 fonts, though after my last OS reinstall I pared it down to about 50 installed fonts to keep things sane. I do the same with my computer. About four or five years ago my font folder was just way, way too full. So now I just keep CDRs handy that I've compiled and leaving only the basics on the computer. I've been designing for 15 years now and have gathered together a massive frickin' collection from all the clients I’ve worked with. Ten thousand? Wouldn't surprise me. With all the various gigs I figure I probably have one of everything, though not always under the same name given the rate of duplication between foundries. But the other day I didn't have a particular Swiss911 variant that a client had used. Apparently you can never have too many fonts after all.
• I've got TEN BILLION BILLION BILLION MILLION TRILLION penises Quid! Dude! I seriously hope with weaponry like that you have a sponsorship deal with Trojan!
• Just the font for Quid - Penic Masturbata I suppose you could call it 'Comic Glans'.
• Just watch out when selecting 'Sans Glans'.
• Heh! Penic Masturbata. Comic Glans. Nice one(s).
• I have more sex because of my fonts.
• This may help with penic masturbata font sizing. I really don't know whether to NSFW this. Your call.
• Speaking of Helvetica - is it really just amazingly badly hinted in Windows, or is my copy (circa-1997 HP, according to Windows font tool) just a crappy copy? The X-height is inconsistent, the font is all jaggedy, it looks like utter crap. I've heard that Arial (yes, I know, bastard imitation, shut up) is hinted better than Helvetica. But Helvetica looks fine on a Mac. So what gives? If my Helvetica is wrong, well, damn. Why doesn't it come with Windows like a good font should? (And I only have about 530 fonts installed. Some are great, some are free and sort of crappy. However I am about to add about 20 new ones. Thanks.)