![]() Thanks for the comments everyone, so far. So the big lesson I learned from this post is don’t cut corners, use lot’s of visuals, make it interesting, word hard, and the web will figure out that the post should do well! Several bloggers grabbed the big jpg and pasted it as-is into their posts – makes for some nice swiss-ish eye candy. I think the big value-add in all the tweets and other trackbacks was that there was graphics and a PDF download. It will pass 10,000 views by weeks end according to how it’s tracked the last couple days. This post, about a month old, finally caught wind in the last few days thanks to a few key tweets from Smashing Magazine and Jacob Cass. I’d say I spent between 8-10 hours on this and the parent post. But I had done at least that amount of time in research for the parent post about the top 19 fonts. I think I spent 4-5 hours on the graphics and production for the post – I can’t recall exactly. Hi Ted: I developed them in Illustrator, which is the PDF you see there, and then ripped the PDF or AI into Photoshop at a high enough resolution to allow me to cut the columns out to fill out the 470px wide slot I have, and rest at 72 dpi. Make sure you aren’t drinking or eating anything ). ![]() Just do this one in your head: Bodoni Poster with Helvetica Extra Light Condensed. Too much contrast between faces also produces gag-inducing results. The more you look at that combination the more it looks bad, especially if you get similar weights and point sizes. Or try Aksidenz Grotesk and News Gothic to really see something hideous that at first glance doesn’t seem wrong. Put Bodoni and Clarendon together to see what I mean. The one rule you have to stick to is create contrast (not too much) and not concord. You certainly can mix them wrong to disastrous results. If you have an 11×17 printer, or can tile a letter-sized print, this looks great at a larger size.Īs for your teacher and boss who say that serifs and sans-serifs shouldn’t be mixed, I would say that they can be mixed if you mix them right. Hi Kevin: Thanks for the reference! I thought it was really important to have the PDF down load available as the screen resolution just doesn’t do the fonts justice. ![]() A text list version of these combinations.A link to a PDF version (2 column) of the original I composed.We must also technically call this a list of top typeface combinations, which is what it really is (Google “fonts and typefaces” for some spirited discussions).A very long chart of the font combinations.I also tweaked font size and leading in the interest of creating uniformity amongst the examples. This involved using the occasional semibold or light to balance a font out at certain point size. Our context here was strictly delimited, and so any of these combinations might warrant further experimentation for even better results.įinally, I tried to keep the look of each example as close as possible to each other. Pretty much any two fonts can be balanced out and made to work with each other in some type of context. You may love some of these combinations and hate others, or be unphased by yet others (or you may think I dwell on this too much). I simply choose to spread them out amongst themselves, keeping the use of repeats down to a minimum. (all serif typefaces) to go with Futura (a sans serif typeface). For instance, I could have picked Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, or Minion, etc. I tried to mix it up, but had to make some arbitrary decisions. All the font combinations got the same “lorem” text. I chose the simple model of a bold headline font and normal weight body font. Set a line of Times Roman over Garamond and you’ll see what I mean. For excellent font pairings, the farther apart the typeface styles are, as a guideline, the more luck you’ll have. I simply followed the golden rule of font combinations, which is simply to combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. What we have here is that list of 19 top fonts once again, but this time combined into pairs to give us 19 best font combinations. Take a look at those top fonts if you want and come right back because now we are going to have a little typography fun. Why 19? Because at exactly 20, the “long tail” shot right out and the differences in tallies became negligible. I could have had 100, but I got it down to under 50, and from there whittled it down to just the 19 best fonts. Update: April 5, 2016: I recently compiled a list of the 19 most popular fonts according to usage by graphic designers from all over the web. Update: February 26, 2019: After nine years of the digital-only edition, the Big Book of Font Combinations is available in glorious, full-sized print editions: paperback and hardcover.
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