Tuesday, April 08, 2008

sofobomotypo II

Font choices. So many choices. TrueType fonts, OpenType fonts, thick, thin, serif, san serif, slab serif, modern, old style, readable, legible. I was starting to get into that spiral of not being able to make a decision. The whole thing about SoFoBoMo is that there really isn't time for that. So I knocked together some samples and came up with something that I like. I knew I wanted to move away a bit from the tired, overused, built-in fonts. Didn't want to use Times New Roman. Didn't want to use Arial. Helvetica seems a bit played out and maybe tricky to work with. Comic Sans was calling... I found a few good resources for free fonts, online. Smashing magazine had a great list of 40 free fonts and I picked up several of them. Lots of good options out there. District Thin is attractive and clean. Anivers is lovely, as is Diavlo. I really like Museo but particularly wanted the light and heavy weights which aren't available for free. I downloaded a few of these, made up some sample pages and printed them out. It was much easier making the final choices from hard copy samples. They looked quite different on the screen and the font sizes made more sense printed. I ended up picking M+ Outline, which is also used for the new logo font at the top of this page. I've tried to keep things simple, one serif body font, one sans serif font for titles, in different weights and colours to create some contrast, while repeating the same letter shapes. I'm moving on from Typography now...

2 comments:

Paul said...

Gordon, I went with Garamond. It's a great book font, easy to read, and is casual, which natches the intent of my book. I stayed away from the over used fonts, too.

Anonymous said...

Another great resource for free fonts is dafont.com. They have a great mix of creative and simple fonts, and I download from there quite frequently.