The July Tips and Tricks page-The 20 fonts we can't live without

I think the Tips this month is longer than the video tutorial!

Please check out Bouton's 20 Desert Island Fonts this month.

After working a little on the new Fonts and Typography forum , and being a fontaholic, and having worked with digital, optical, dry transfer,and occasionally electric typewriter fonts since the late 1960s, I wanted to write a sort of definitive piece on which fonts designers should own. Not Desktop Publishing people, but folks who design and draw, like Xaraists. I noticed that I've been emphasizing typefaces starting around the May tutorial on logo design, and people ask me what font is good for this and that, and I realized that I have a typeface collection to be admired; I chose every font carefully, and use each with the same care.

That's what this month's piece is all about, and perhaps we'll add the discussion here to the F & T forum, because I feel very strongly that if you don't have an adequate variety of solid, working fonts—and I'm not talking about The Most Popular Grunge Font on 1001fonts.com—your design work is not going to be everything it can be. Very few visual communications pieces today can live without text, and typefaces are how you dress up your words to go out and get your message across. I also provide you with a few links to truly outstanding and affordable (you don't usually get both at once) font clearing houses online. When I started using a personal computer, you could get an almost complete collection of "Font Essentials" on a disk or CD at a computer flea market, but those days are gone. I'm happy to say I've located some great stuff online that doesn't have the word "Adobe" partially scraped off a font.

Agree or disagree with me this month, but I promise you that you won't be cheated if you follow my lead with what I feel are the 20 most (okay, there's probably 21 or 22) important fonts you should have, or lay your hands on this week.

Bouton's 20 Desert Island Fonts

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You'll be lost without them.

—gary

I really found this quite interesting. I have a few of those fonts you mentioned and I really like a few that you mentioned that I dont have. I Regularly check the Softmaker free font of the month and I have gotten some nice typefaces from there. I've been thinking about purchasing their classic webfonts collection as it seems a good deal on a nice collection of fonts that I could use for both print and web design

It's a good deal. It truly is. $30 gets you "classic webfonts", but the "webfonts" thing is just buzz. It's a license to use a font on the web, but you can use it any way you please for print, so it's a trendy headline but the offer is rock solid. Go for it if you don't have these, Frances.

Here's a quicky guide to the names. Some names are so old, they're Public Domain so the names are industry standard. Nice you're getting Stymie: I use that when American Typewriter is too heavy. Clean, designed by the late Type God Herb Lubalin. Cheltenham is nice, too. It's a Clarendon font, legible, good when you want to set oversized text for a children's story. And nobody uses Windsor, so you can revive it—it's truly a classy typeface.

65 Classic (Web)Fonts for around $30

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My Best,

Gary

Seems like Deja Vu with the 20 Island fonts.

You did pretty good, Gary. I would be hard pressed to ever come up with (only) 20 fonts. Which is why I am glad you wrote this article...

Optima. Souvenir. Neither would likely make my top 20. Why? I did all the publication materials for a company spanning a 12 year period. All Optima and Souvenir. Oh, I still like them but they need more of a time out. Classic faces, though. Never will be parted with Futura. Helvetica and Helv. Neue I don't seem to ever uninstall and I use them a lot. Minion and Myriad families will stay installed forever in all likelihood.

Man, the list goes on. I consider the above (and more) to be loves. Cannot abandon my loves. My fontaholism compels me to wander, though. So I have flings with fonts I pick up now and again (mostly "now"). My music and font fund is nearly always depleted unless I am saving up pennies to buy an expensive family.

Man, why did you have to post this? I think I am going to rob the font piggy bank...

Take care, Mike

Mike—

There's a big purple CAUTION sticker at the top of the article.

Read it, man!


:)

My Best,

Gary


P.S. Souvenir was revived from the 1914 Morris Benton original by the International Typeface Corporation. ITC used to get chided by industry professionals all the time about how they perverted Bookman and other classics by making the X-height way too tall. I like some of the stuff they did, and Herb Lubalin was one of ITC's founders (Stymie, Avant Garde, others). But Souvenir is useless and has always been useless. It was the last resort of untalented Art Directors in the 1960s and 1970s.

Optima, however, is wonderful. Hermann Zapf has never sung off-key in his career.

I did read it. And promptly ignored it. I am also known to smoke a cigar on occasion, also ignoring that warning.

I mean, fonts are cool. They breath life into what really is the skeleton of a design. They communicate--they are alive--and part of any design. I am creating a couple small posters right now. Cannot show them unless I rework the subject, but the Kabul Ult. Bold goes well with the Humanist 777 Black. After living with these two fonts on these designs, I cannot imagine using others. Like seeing a well done movie and not being able to picture another, equally good actor, in the same part.

Warnings. Harrumph.

Take care, Mike

Great Tips & Tricks issue! Very useful and informative.

Because I need to maintain my self-appointed status as Resident "Know-It-All"...

Mike, I hear you loud and clear (mostly the "clear" part); that's how I feel about typefaces, and I've heard similar analogies from other designers such as Daniel Will-Harris.

Okay, Adrian Frutiger, bless his soul, is still alive, and he designed Humanist 777 Black for Bitstream. And it bears a strong resemblance to his namesake typeface, which is fair enough. Every good artist has a style, and often repeats it. Frutiger designed his namesake font for the signage at De Gaulle International Airport. It's clean, and I personally prefer it to America's official signage typeface, Helvetica. Frutiger has reworked the font and it's called Frutiger Next, in case anyone is interested. He took his time and made different styles for us, not unlike the Helvetica Neue we have today.

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By the way: I often digress and get a little into the accomplishments of font creators because these people a lot of times are living artists. They're influenced by the same stuff as we are, and possibly, you could pick up the phone and talk to some of these living legends.

"Kabul, Kabel Kar, and other derrivations are from the typeface "Kabel", designed by Rudolf Koch, who died in 1934. Isn't it amazing how fresh Kabel looks today, for an 80+ year old typeface? Kabel was used for the screen titles at the end of The Beatles' cartoon "Yellow Submarine", and it's a terrific font for package design, IMO. Koch also created Koch Rivoli, Koch Antiqua (which looks like Bernhard Roman), and he has a large symbols collection out there that I'm sure he had nothing to do with as digital media goes. Pick up his book, The Book of Signs at Amazon. Great historical stuff about Christian and Pre-Christian glyphs, and runes.

And no, I'm not getting strange on your folks, with the ancient symbols. Step into this pentagram and let's talk. :)

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My Best,
Gary

I guess I had the middle east on the mind...Kabel. Yes indeed.

And, I never get bored with info on designers of any type.

Mike

I wasn't criticizing you on the spelling of Kabel, Mike.

I've seen lookalikes called "Kabul", and I myself arrogantly designed my own version from scratch in the 1990s, and called it "Kaboom".

Didn't and couldn't improve upon it. But at least I have a lookalike of it I can share and know its origin. :)

-g

I know...but for correctness' sake it needed rectifying.

Now, this doesn't work as well as the original, but here are the two fonts I mentioned above. And dithering sucks but it was quick.

Take care, Mike

Looking good, Mike!

Folks, you gotta click on Mike's graphic #11. It animates, but not as the thumbnail we see, it's sort of an Easter egg, so watch carefully!

I was over at Linotype today—which is the fontaholic's equivalent of looking in Tiffany's showroom window from the street—and checked out the Frutiger Next Ultra style. Mike, I gotta report that Humanist 777 is so danged close, it's ridiculous.

And then your mock-up got me thinking about other font similarities and purely with text, how you could express a graphical idea. Which is more appropriate to be doing over in the Fonts and Typography monthly challenges, but as long as I'm here...

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I un-obliqued the Eras regular typeface. I like it better, and it's served me well for over a decade without the 2 degree slant someone originally put in the normal and bold versions.

Oh, and the use of Avante Garde, two very different weights butted together is a very, very old design. If you're stick for a logo idea, and neither you nor anyone else has done this in 5 years, you're safe to submit it to a client.

—gare

I have un obliqued that Eras font before by skewing it back a bit! I've done this the odd time with other fonts as well to give them a bit of different look. I'll often stretch, squash, skew and even mold fonts when putting together ad layouts.

Just read this, and for those who are interested Corel has a couple products with huge numbers of fonts in them for low cost. Yes, I know Corel and Xara have a bad history, and many may not want to support them, but if you want 900+ fonts for < $100, check out their WordPerfect home edition. Old Corel Draw 7 disks can be found online which also have this font collection (I believe), and some of them are less than $50.

Thank you, David; that's a good tip and a good link.

I imagined in the mid-1990s that Corel Corp. bought out Bitstream's font cataloge in its entirety. Happy to learn they did not, Bitstream is now owned by Monotype, and you can't get 900 typefaces for the price of a word processor anywhere else!

My Best,

Gary

I just got an email ad on July 31, 2012 from Smith Micro, advertising 1,000 Opentype fonts, plus a lot of clipart in SVG file format for $40, the caveat being they say this is a Macintosh product. Um, unless I've been asleep at the wheel, or the download comes as a StuffIt archive (in which case you download a free version of StuffIt Expander for Windows, OpenType and SVG files aren't Macintosh-specific, so in theory this $40 download deal applies to everyone.

1,000 typefaces for $40

Several times the pinheads at Smith Micro have advertised a product "for the Macintosh" that works biplatform.

If you're shopping for a collection of typefaces, this looks like a good option, the offer ends August 12th.

Which means it will come around in another 6 months.

:)

—g

I think the issue of Mac applies to their Logo Studio software that is part of the bundle.

Take care, Mike

Yes, apparently there's a Macintosh bare-bones vector program for making cookie-cutter logos.

Still, $40 for look-alike fonts, a thousand? That's "shovelware" I can live with! :)

-g