Typefaces I have known and loved

I wrote recently that several distinguished designers – Vignelli, Birdsall, Experimental Jetset – ran their whole careers on a handful of typefaces, while Froshaug and Schmid are known for using just one face each. I haven’t yet whittled my list down to a dozen or fewer, but here are some of the faces I have used and loved best. What most, if not all, of them have in common is a certain irregularity or grit; an unpretentious manner; an avoidance of the pen-(in)formed. Often some distance from the identifiable historic model is an advantage. Free doesn’t hurt.

Akzidenz-Grotesk
designers unknown
various suppliers
Yes, the immortal Helvetica can look great in a lot of incarnations ( as a text face it hasn’t fared so well since the death of metal ), but Akzidenz-Grotesk is the granddaddy. Gerstner was wrong to want to regularize it: each of the original faces, which weren’t even designed together, has its own flavor and uses, though the boldest are pretty uncouth.

Bell Gothic
Chauncey H. Griffith
various suppliers
So ugly at any kind of normal size ( not what it was designed for, of course ) that it’s great all over again.

BP Dots
George Triantafyllakos
Backpacker
A free monospaced dot-matrix family with standard old-style figures; small caps; ( monotonic ) Greek... Love it.

Brill
John Hudson & Alice Savoie
Tiro Typeworks / Brill
Too bland for print, but I use it in my notes app because its factory word-space is reasonable, text figures are standard, the bold and italic aren’t gross, and it’s got small caps, Greek, Cyrillic, and IPA, which cover most of my needs. Free for noncommercial use. Totally brill, innit.

Bulmer
William Martin
Monotype
I do use Baskerville ( Nova ) to set music to match the Hymnal 1982, and I’ve seen Baskervilles used well in, for example, an edition of Pope(?) and, rather differently, in a couple of Thompson’s Westvaco books, but I’m not a great fan, and much prefer Bulmer’s color and shape when this sort of thing is called for.

Caeciliae
Matthew Spencer
Oblates of St Joseph
A chant-notation typeface making creative use of OpenType ligatures for mnemonically easy entry. The design also beats the competition, although it has remained frustratingly incomplete for a number of years. Free.

Century Expanded
Linn Boyd Benton / Morris Fuller Benton
various suppliers
A classic, far transcending its origins and even its 1970s revival.

Columbus
Patricia Saunders & Robin Nicholas
Monotype
A 1990s revival of a roman type used( ? cut? ) by Jorge Coci, which I believe is also the roman used in the Complutensian Polyglot. Columbus Italic is said to be based on a Granjon face of 1543, though I haven’t bothered to trace it. Columbus Roman manages to be both entirely reminiscent of its model and entirely modern in its feel or finish, and is a welcome and underused alternative to the Aldine–Garamond model. Was off the market for a while but is now once again available.

Concorde
Günther Gerhard Lange
Berthold
Pretentious typographers and typophiles love to hate ( The ) Times ( New ) Roman, but metal and maybe phototype versions could be used perfectly well for straightforward text work; the small caps and text figures were decent, and the original bold weight had a style all its own. There is, to my knowledge, no really decent digital version of Times, but Concorde, Lange’s takeoff on the Times model, fared far better in the digital transition and has many merits of its own, not least a crisp and slightly wonky italic.

Copperplate [ Heavy ] Gothic
Frederic Goudy
various suppliers
In very limited and specific editorial circumstances like category labels.

Ehrhardt
[ Miklós Kis ]
Monotype
As with several other Monotype faces, less faithfulness to its model is not necessarily a bad thing. As with several other Monotype faces, the small caps are good, the italic is poor, and the bold is gross. Neither the Penguin/Pelican Shakespeare nor the New English Bible, to name a couple of famous instances of it, would have been themselves without it, and I think the digital version is viable.

Folio
Konrad Friedrich Bauer & Walter Baum
various suppliers
It’s deliciously awful, like the characters are all slightly different sizes and have been laid down by dry transfer. Wow.

Fournier
Pierre Simon Fournier
Monotype
The roman is a little clunky and the italic is wacky ( and their pairing demonstrates that a roman and italic need not even have the same x-height to go together ). What’s not to like? If you can get enough ink or toner down on the paper, Fournier can hold its own in a modern context.

Futura
Paul Renner
various suppliers
Like Helvetica, Futura has been through umpteen changes of fashion and never missed a beat. Tight? Loose? Ultra-thin? Extra-bold? Plain letters? Crazy glyphs? You got it.

Gandhi Sans
Cristobal Henestrosa & Raul Plancarte, David Kimura & Gabriela Varela
Librerías Gandhi S.A de C.V.
My admiration for the finish and flexibility of this excellent, free, humanist sans only grows. It puts many commercial releases in the shade.

Gandhi Serif
Cristobal Henestrosa & Raul Plancarte, David Kimura & Gabriela Varela
Librerías Gandhi S.A de C.V.
Like Fournier and perhaps others on this list, it needs some care for the amount of ink or toner getting onto the page, and its italic meets only some needs, but it manages to look contemporary without, so far, feeling precious.

Garamond ATF
Jean Jannon / Morris Fuller Benton
ATF
The best produced and most useful ( not the most faithful ) of the Jannon revivals that I know about. The digital version is nice and sturdy, though someone needs to reclassify some of the over-eager ligatures as discretionary.

Gill Sans
Eric Gill
Monotype
With a bit of tracking out, its rhythm is improved and its appearance approaches that of the metal type; Gill Sans Nova adds small caps and old-style figures, finally making it useable for ( some, carefully considered ) real text. Froshaug complained that the g stands out, but this is true of not a few other faces as well.

iA Writer Duospace and Quattro
Mike Abbink / Oliver Reichenstein
Bold Monday / IBM / Information Architects
Developed from IBM Plex Mono and Sans, themselves really remarkably good, crisp pieces of work, but enlivened by a few sprawling italic minuscules and whatnot. Also free.

Lekton Sans
A whole bunch of people
Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino
There are other good monospace faces, but this is my on-screen go-to for its poise, its fluent italic, small caps, old-style figures, ligatures, sizable character set and a few non-monospace alternates, not to mention a battery of dingbats. Free.

Malabar
Dan Reynolds
Linotype
In the abstract it’s not my favorite; I really don’t love the over-lively italic and probably wouldn’t choose to set lengthy text in it, but I’ve settled on using it for lyrics and annotations in musical scores, where it goes well enough with the notation and looks up-to-date ( that giant x-height helps ) in an understated way.

Manuale
Eduardo Tunni & Pablo Cosgaya
This freebie does what several other commercial releases only wish they could. Now with ligatures, text figures, and a huge character set ( no small caps, but the x-height is so large that you hardly miss them ), the extremely well-fitted-and-finished roman with a range of weights is possibly outshone by a killer italic. I try not to fetishize individual glyphs anymore ( he says, thinking of the Fairfield italic v and w ), but in this case y is for yummy.

Melody
Harry Hagan
St Meinrad Archabbey
Unclear licensing situation ( like a lot of the music produced at St Meinrad, thanks ) and no longer available, but the only easy way I know how to notate, say, a hymn-tune with control of its spacing so that it can be spaced according to the text and not the other way around, or so that the metrical or syllabic structure of a tune can be studied by aligning the beats from one line to the next. Stemless noteheads are a bonus. This also happens to be a digitization of an attractive music face used by OUP in the mid-twentieth century.

Mendoza
José Mendoza y Almeida
ITC
My version seems to have some side-bearing problems ( which InDesign’s optical kerning function can partly mitigate ), but this face has some potential for careful use, having so far aged better than its designer’s other text face, Photina. It pairs very well with the Caeciliae chant notation face.

Monotype Grotesque
Frank Hinman Pierpoint
Monotype
Gerstner, Spencer, and other Modernists were not wrong: this thing just looks good and gets on with the job in the most understatedly competent way. As with Akzidenz-Grotesk, the various weights and widths have lives of their own.

Nesbitt Gothic
Dick Pape
One of several badass wood types digitized from the Rob Roy Kelly Collection.

Neuzeit-Buch S
Arthur Ritzel
various suppliers
It took a lot of doing to get Neuzeit from crap to cool, but it got done. A bit of a sleeper, but has always appealed and succeeded for certain applications. See also, possibly, Spline Sans.

Petrucci
MakeMusic
Finale’s plain old music typeface remains the least fussy and least space-consuming option out there, I think. Many other digital music faces are so wide or bulbous that they make everything look like children’s beginning piano music. I still wish someone would produce a digital version of a particular set of punches used extensively in the nineteenth century by Breitkopf ( see, for example, the old Bach-Gesellschaft edition ) and I think others, which has notably more inclined noteheads.

Plantin
[ Robert Granjon ] / Frank Hinman Pierpoint
Monotype
As a revival, unfaithful and clunky. As a robust newspaper face taken on its own terms, a classic. Great small caps, bog-standard Monotype text figures, pretty frumpy italic. Looks good on screen and on paper. Forget the long-ascender version.

Playfair
Claus Eggers Sørensen
A strong flavor, suited most obviously for setting nineteenth-century Anglo-American stuff in a highly cultivated context. ( Also needs some serious tracking-in.) Did I mention it’s free?

Poplar
Barbara Lind
Adobe
Chunky, funky wood type.

Proforma
Petr van Blokland
Typetr
I worked with Proforma daily for some years, though that’s been a long time ago now. Designed for business forms, it can do a lot more: it looked great in Dwell magazine, where I first got to know it, and was not out of place, I think, in the range of parish publications where I used it. It performs well at a range of sizes, and the surprisingly ( but by no means overly ) calligraphic italic is something of a bonus, though a legacy character set and some odd choices about diacritics limit the face’s usefulness somewhat. I worry that the Hague style ( Proforma, Collis, Elena, etc.) begins to look a bit slick.

Quadraat
Fred Smeijers
FontFont
Quadraat needs especially careful treatment – please not too big, just the right leading, and possibly never justified setting – and is very difficult to find a companion for ( I don’t think Quadraat is the sort of thing that translates well to a sanserif model; Syntax might work instead of the eponymous sans ). I’ve seen it look pretty terrible. But in the right circumstances its quirks are balanced by its competence and its italic comes into its own, and it has so far not gone out of style. In the end I have used it only once, but I was extremely happy with it.

Sabon
[ Claude Garamond ] / Jan Tschichold
Monotype
Still looks good – elegant enough but pretty unassuming – and is a lot less slick than, say, Verdigris. Since, among other things, Tschichold somehow managed to make a nonkerning f work, I can set f ï in non-underlaid hymn texts ( or, perish the thought, psalms pointed for Anglican chant ) without a collision. I do wish the foundry display version were available in digital form.

UnB Pro
Gustavo Ferreira
Universidade de Brasília
Derived from Liberation Sans, brought to a commendably high level of finish, and given away to the commons: ‘With this, UnB makes a contribution to the international public of designers and computer users in general. This action is pioneering in the country and it is hoped that other institutions and companies will have UnB as a reference, adopting its ethical stance and its policy of technological innovation, digital inclusion and sustainability.’ Salute.

Volta
Konrad Friedrich Bauer & Walter Baum
various suppliers
An expanded Clarendon, redrawn purposely for this width. The regular weight is wimpy, but the semibold and bold have real presence: see all those astonishingly great Dick Bruna book covers.