List your favorite fonts and why!

[mwenz]

Hmm. The new fonts section has gotten me thinking about typefaces all day, with this topic rattling around the skull the most.

It would be difficult for me to pick a few, especially different ones than Gary's and Frances' pick of Scriptina—I would like to make some invites with it one day.

Among my favorites is the Goudy Old Style family as for serif'd type. For non-serif type heads, I have paired it with Goudy Sans and like the sans version's playfulness.

If I could call all 61 weights and styles of Helvetica and Helv. Neue that I have a single font, well, I would include it in "the bag." I don't get tired of using the variations.

I have used the Warnock Pro family off and on over the last decade for various things. I like the unfinished trailing descenders on both the cap and lowercase "J" and what looks like a hesitation of the descender of the lowercase "y" when using a nib and ink.

Hmm. Lots more I am sure.

Mike

[Gare]

Fredric Goudy was also known for creating Copperplate, and a font he specified could only be used by the University of California in 1934, called California, which was later recast as ITC Berkley, also a nice serif Roman font.

A couple of things that Make Goudy Text Oldstyle distinctive is:

• the lower-than-expected x-height for the lowercase fonts. Look at the blue dotted line and see where the lowercase letters come up to in Times Roman.

• The angle at which the thin parts occur in the Roman ("thick and thin" strokes) characters. It's called a diagonal stress, as opposed to Didot and other modern fonts that use a vertical stress (Bodoni is a good example). Oldstyles can also be distinguished by the staggering of the number characters. They have alternating baselines which often make a long typed number quick to read.

Goudy Sans actually does have a very slight serif. Here's example's of Helvetica compared to Futura and Goudy Sans. Fonts go in and out of style and I think Futura is coming back; I'll tend to use Futura for serious assignments and a little "lighter" face is Gill Sans.

[mwenz]

Yep, Futura is a keeper. Its slight variations of shape (compare the uppercase Bs in your example) appeal to me.

Mike

[Cloud]

Myriad for print and trebuchet for web

[Gare]

...and 'why'?



I also really like and use the Myriad family wherever possible in print.

Alternatives I could live with include Dax and Frutiger, same sort of stark but human feel.

[mwenz]

My favorite italicized text is ... Engravers' Old Style 205. Why? I love the details, especially of the lower case letter forms. It appears to me to be both a formal style appropriate for books to announcements, yet not as much as perhaps a formal script font.



Take care, Mike

[Gare]

What foundry, Mike? I'd love to add Engraver's to my collection.

It might be the only font I don't own

My current fave italic is Galliard, after Matthew Carter.



—g