Types of fonts
My 5 fonts that I keep coming back to: Gilroy, Meta Serif Pro, Roboto, Georgia, Work Sans. So I created my own list of 5 fonts that I use most often. I came to the same conclusion as Massimo and many other designers-I don’t need a huge range of fonts of questionable quality to choose from, I only need a few high quality ones. Being self-taught had a huge role in how long it took me to grasp that it’s not the quantity of fonts that matters, it’s the quality.
#Types of fonts trial#
I learned that by trial and error through my career.
These are just the basics, but just using these, we can create lots of original designs and variety with a single font. Size, contrast, placement, background and foreground colours, and how it’s combined with other fonts in a design.
It’s not just about which font we choose, but also how we use it. Massimo Vignelli’s example of using Helvetica from above illustrates this. But the question here is-do we really need all these fonts? And should we really just forget about the web safe fonts which we often consider as “boring?” My 5 fontsĪn inexperienced designer thinks that they need a vast amount of fonts to choose from, an experienced one knows that they can use one font in many different ways. It’s now completely common for a designer to always pick a different font for each project. And as soon as they could start to experiment with different fonts, they never looked back to the tried and tested heavyweights from the past. They were the two obvious choices as web safe fonts, as well as Arial which is a copy of Helvetica. Times New Roman and Helvetica fell out of favour with designers soon after the proliferation of web fonts in the early 2000s. Massimo Vignelli’s 5 fonts which he built his rich career on: Futura, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Bodoni, Century. So what were his 5 fonts? They’re fonts that we rarely use today (except Futura). Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones and trash the rest.
In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. He produced vast amounts of graphic design in his incredibly rich career, but only used a few fonts for most of it. He’s one of the designers, if not the designer, who made Helvetica as popular and common as it is (or was).Īn example of how Massimo masterfully used Helvetica in different ways. His work had a huge impact on the graphic design of the 20th century. Massimo Vignelli was one of the best visual communicators of our times. I acquired enough experience and learned so much about web typography in my career that I naturally came to the conclusion that many designers had reached before me-all you need is 5 fonts. I had moved away from being a freelance graphic designer in the years since then, but I still do branding, web design and graphic design work for my own projects.
It’s kinda funny to look back and realise that it was harder for me to choose fonts when there were fewer to choose from than now. With no formal education in design or typography, my choices were uninformed and limited. There weren’t as many web fonts to pick from when I started my freelance career in the early 2000s, still I was always overwhelmed by the number of fonts to choose from.