Poll: 25 Classic Fonts That Will Last a Whole Design Career

Garamond

I've always had a soft spot for Gill Sans m'self.

I voted Futura. So pretty!

cosign garamond

DIN

I am a sucker for cold, clinical, sans-serif fonts, so, for me, this is a toss-up b/w DIN, Futura, Helvetica (Neue) & Frutiger.

nice poll btw. ILX should have more design-related polls.

honorable mention vote for Zurich

voted DIN. always a goto. (current site logo in it). could have voted rotis. love all the diff variations (sans, serif, semi sans, semi serif). helvitica might take this though.

lots of cool fonts there but garamond is definitely prob the most classic. always use it for papers/resumes/etc

'definitely prob'

no Caslon, no credibility

http://www.subtraction.com/pics/0609/060925_cooper_black.gif

there's another one that just says COOPER BLACK POWER but i couldn't find it

as much as i love helvetica ultra light (most calming font ever) i went for garamond. so classy.

also where's courier? the greatest monospace font ever drawn.

wtf is with all the garamond love, you people are weird!

It's the tenth anniversary of my help-meat devotion to Furtura (& its family) & just for this thread I'm gonna have an affair with a chubby little serif, Clarendon.

i would swap out a lot of these, personally. what about verdana, the most readable screen font of all time?

I'm pretty sure Futura Bold Condensed was the Weekly World News headline font.

Other sans serif that's kinda seducing me: Rockwell.

(I kinda feel like using Futura is tantamount to making my house some cute-clever cutaway tableaux c/o Wes Anderson's constant use of it.)

ooh, can I be the pedantic, anal-retentive fuckwit to correct Abbott? Rockwell is a slab serif.

what's wrong with living in a cute-clever wes anderson tableaux? it'd certainly be an improvement over my current mundane existence.

what about verdana, the most readable screen font of all time?

Georgia beats Verdana for screen legibility IMO, and definitely has more claim to elegance.

georgia is a good one too, no argument here

i have a sense verdana is the helvetica of our age, tho

this makes me want to retell a stupid personal anecdote. i was watching the helvetica documentary and some guy was like "asking if you like helvetica is like asking if you like off-white ... there's just nothing there" or something to that effect. and i practically threw my shoe at the TV because, as we all know, off-white is like one of the best colors ever!

no comic sans?

helvetica haters are arrogant poseurs, t/f

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3506/3791223542_c55a2c133b_o.jpg

(from the type tart cards series)

voted Akzidenz Grotesk, great band name.

sciolism: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
fuck!
We all know I means slab, not sans, right?

i have a sense verdana is the helvetica of our age, tho

I fear that Arial is the Helvetica of our age.

it's a typo! it happens. we all know you know.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2623/3791265514_fb47cb00bb_o.jpg

tart cards is the best thing I have seen in a long time btw

Kind of overused but I still like Clarendon a lot - something about the lowercase a's and r's. I like Bodoni and Futura a lot too.

My most hated has to be Algerian - it's EVERYWHERE. I can't not see it now and it amazes me how often it's used.

voted garamond here, too. like a lot of those fonts, but have a sentimental attachment to garamond because it was the first one i ever typeset and letterpress-printed.

my favourite this week is: albertus MT light

http://origin.myfonts.com/112/fs/u/87/3386e8759cb77c015ea27db8f5c510.gif

ehhh it looks kind of shit there ^^^

http://origin.myfonts.com/112/fs/u/fe/70b7e86854f65ae58b762e1467d8b8.gif

nevermind a design career, if you intend your writing to be read, I can't don't know of much that tops garamond et alia

effective signage seems all but narrensicher compared to building big comfortable pages of text with no pictures. v. sorry sans bros

Voted Garamond, but really like Mrs Eaves italics.

Yeah, courier should be here. Or something fixed width, anyway.

I really really rate Georgia, I don't know why it doesn't get more credit. It looks great!

I love Akzidenz Grotesk, not as beefed up as it's younger relative Helvetica, but it's the lovely looking numbers which seal it for me, so much more refined.

what, no wingdings?

Surely everyone on ILX should vote for Meta?

Lots of fonts I love here: my heart lies with the booky serifs, tho' I have standard British addiction to Gill Sans (but the article's wrong, no? It's never been the London Underground font).

Went for Sabon: the pen-stroke angularity & contrast take it ahead of Bembo and I'm a bit tired of Garamond. Also like Mrs Eaves and that v useful 'trust this sensible document' feeling that Minion has.

Sciolism, that anti-Garamond article you linked is great (also great comment from Jonathan Hoefler underneath - would have taken Requiem were it in this poll), but c'mon it's specifically ITC Garamond they're hating on, not Garamond in general.

wtf is with all the garamond love, you people are weird!

this

Rockwell and Calvert are everywhere these days (ads, websites etc.)

don't want to vote Helvetica but really hard not to

Garamond is prettier, but I want the generic invisibility of Times.

Univers Extra Black is my company's corporate logo font, and I actually kinda like it, so I voted for that.

I looove Gill Sans. When I was in high school I was obsessed with fonts and when I would go to the movies I would guess the font on the credits.

the company I work for used Gill for about a decade as their main font. I can't vote for it out of sheer sick-of-itness

caved and went Helveticazzzz

Gill has such a tiny x-height, makes it a pain to use in a CSS list.

I voted for my favorite underdog, News Gothic.

Voted Futura. Just always loved the look of it.

I was going to vote for Garamond, but Mrs Eaves looks a bit better in the sample. Same goes with Bembo. (Obviously partial to booky fonts.)

I'm wondering if he's read this:
http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Typefaces-Lifetime-Joshua-Berger/dp/1592532780

shit voted Bembo, meant to vote Minion.

weird - i wrote this long post about Frutiger and it vanished.

anyways - that's what i voted. i like it.

These fonts all look exactly the same!!

The best font ever is the old-school computer font of the 70s (as seen in the opening credits to the movies WarGames and Revenge of the Nerds). I've been trying to find a downloadable font for them for years.

I wanna add another vote to the non-represented Georgia. I convert all my papers to it these days. So pleasant to look at.

I can't really remember the titles now, but isn't it OCR-A? http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/ocra.php

Are you talking about this for the 80's computer font?
http://www.brainybetty.com/PPT9/fonts.3.gif

You can download it here: http://www.brainybetty.com/fonts.htm

it does, however, fly in the face of the thread question!

Bembo.

p.s. haha I used VAG Rounded for the logo/titles for the film I was GD on. Easily the highest profile work I've done, was shown on Entertainment Tonight. I will rep for it for all time.

bit tired of all humanist sans btw (DAX, Frutiger, Avenir, etc.).

don't understand why you'd want to vote for a monospace font that looks awful on screen.

Wow, thanks joygoat!

thought I had voted for Bembo and made a pretentious comment how I only prefer it in metal form, then made a self-deprecating acknowledgement that I can barely tell one font from another, but it didn't seem to show up.

So Bembo.

In metal type. Conventional wisdom is that the digitization is no good, that it's too week for conventional printing. When I've seen it printed letterpress, it blows me away, and again, I can barely tell one font from another.

Personally on the computer, I use Sabon mostly, because I read about it in a Tsichold book.

i am away from home. is it elements of typographic style or the tufte books that are bembo?

Designed by Eric Gill in 1926, Gill Sans is another widely used font in graphic design. Famous uses include the London Underground signage.

Voted FUTURA.
I also like GARAMOND but it looks bad in italics.
I've never seen COCON before, but it looks neat.

garamond looks beautiful in italics!

Gill Sans is an utter classic, but I've always been really fond of Avant Garde for its Bauhausian stylings.

Gill Sans is an objectively good design, but it has not been done any favours by being default installed on 91% of new computers sold for over $1000 (i.e. Macs)

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

my everyday, go-to font right now is liberation sans. it's what my resume is in -- boring, but very easy on the eyes.

Designed by Eric Gill in 1926, Gill Sans is another widely used font in graphic design. Famous uses include the London Underground signage.

This is wrong :( the London Underground font has squares for tittles, not circles. And it's nicer.
Poor Edward Johnston

― salsa shark, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 9:14 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^ cping this bcz i thought 'is that right?' when i saw them cite it here and it has saved me googling it; also bcz i thought it read 'the london underground font has squares for titties'

Gill Sans is good but Eric Gill fucked his own daughters so I have a problem or two voting for it.

The furore about his Stations Of The Cross in Westminster Cathedral is actually quite funny, bearing in mind the sacrosanct nature of Catholic iconography...they're still there IIRC

Douglas Coupland on Helvetica in his New York Times Blog. http://coupland.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/i-luv-helvetica/

What do we think of EcoFont?

Voted for Gill Sans, used it on my bands album cover after seeing it on an Anya Garbarek cd.

http://i43.tinypic.com/292qy3o.jpg

Clearlake used that font too, for Cedars. And they're also big Cardiacs fans. Wait a minute.....

Have you seen the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog?

http://cuteanimals.todaysbigthing.com/2009/07/30

Frutiger.

This is a wonderful list, btw. I would lose maybe five myself, but who cares what I think.

i care, kenan. i care.

I think Futura is defintely the best of them (futura bold is my favourite font) but I can't stand a's that are just the circle and line, and if it had g's with the two circles that would just just be heaven.

best defence of Avant Garde

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_afyRd7uNzY4/SeTaUcFDh9I/AAAAAAAAAD4/HMK4N2V5MPM/s320/AE.jpg

I voted Akzidenz Grotesk - it's lovely.

Had no idea there was a font called Mrs Eaves - that's my old drama teacher! She reached the semis on Mastermind.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Gotham, Avenir and Clearview are the current "for-a-lifetime" fonts (i.e. there's no such thing).

no DS Motter Ombra no credibility!

Mrs Eaves was Baskerville's wife or something, and that was Emigre's take on his fonts, iirc.

She was initially his mistress I think, then later married. There's quite a funny quote about Baskerville, hang on...

Baskerville's domestic set-up doubtless invoked moral disapproval,and although Sarah was a regular churchgoer, Baskerville seems to have become increasingly truculent towards organized religion and its ministers. It was said of him: 'He had wit, but it was always at the expense of religion and decency, particularly if in the company with the clergy.'

particularly if in company with the clergy sorry

does anyone happen to know what font this is?

https://scontent.flhr3-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/13592824_1074804529265038_8960365424160857507_n.png?oh=893ed74406ccbe328cebea2221497c10&oe=5927F23B

the english text i mean.

Futura Extra Black Condensed

thanks!