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

[Gare]

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



You'll be lost without them.

—gary