[muglo] type faces - which ones and why?
- From: Doug Bale <dougbale@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:54:19 -0700 (PDT)
I'll be darned. Who'd have thought anybody was measuring such things so
precisely? Clearly they're comparing just standard regular or roman faces of
common fonts -- apples to apples, and not mixing in oranges like Abadi
Condensed Light or Cooper Black (or cumquats like Gradl) -- which makes
sense.It suggests what might be an interesting discussion topic for MUGLO: what
fonts do we use, for what purposes, and why? Personally, I use Minion and
Myriad as my default serif and sans-serif fonts, for no particular reason other
than that Adobe Magazine, my Bible for years in all matters to do with design
and typography, was built around those. For personal letters I like Nueva,
highly legible but with just enough character to be noticeable.If I had money
to burn and were still collecting fonts -- I've got about 3,000 now,
most of which I'll never use, and have forbidden myself to add any more -- I
think I might start with one I just discovered last week. Sabon, from Linotype,
is a beautiful open design with a really comprehensive range of variations --
small caps, old-style figures, all the Central European accents, Cyrillic
characters, Greek characters, I'm surprised it doesn't have Gaelic. I'd never
heard of it, but found it acknowledged in a novel I was reading, and so looked
it up, There are samples at http://www.linotype.com/1436/sabon-family.html.We
pick fonts for all kinds of reasons. I used to produce a little national
literary magazine for the Canadian Authors Association and used Bookman for
body text, just because of its name. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't the best
choice I could have made -- clunky serifs, not very well defined accents, and
no ligatures.What do other people find most useful?By the way, Theresa, to
really economize on toner, have you thought
about printing your body type at less than 100 per cent black? Assuming a
decent type size -- say, 10 to 12 points -- you can get quite an effective look
with, say, 80 per cent grey, as long as you've got at least one or two other
elements on the page (subheads, rules, a logo or what have you) at 100 per
cent, just so it doesn't look as if you're merely working with a played-out
toner cartridge.
--- On Sun, 8/9/09, joseph nolan <josephnolan1@xxxxxx> wrote:
Doug, Iç?¥ sure that the article that I read in yahoo news (then itÂ
must be true, right?) just measured the inkspread of the most commonlyÂ
used fonts. As for me, I prefer the Blackoak Standard (because I can).
http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/blogs/the_gadget_hound/rss/article/3751
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