“What Font Should I Use?

”: Five Principles for Choosing and Using Typefaces

By Dan Mayer, 2010

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices — from normal,
conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only
never-ending lists of categories and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose
intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that
I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

1. Dress For The Occasion

Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as
though they were searching for new music to listen to: they
assess the personality of each face and look for something
unique and distinctive that expresses their particular
aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history. This
approach is problematic, because it places too much
importance on individuality.

For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like

getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s
a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and
stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many The most appropriate analogy for picking type
situations, and our job is to try to find the right balance for
the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept,
it’s the acid test that should guide our choice of font.

My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish

pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I bought at a thrift store,
but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet
very often outside of Halloween. Every designer has a few
favorite fonts like this — expressive personal favorites that
we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to
use. More often, I find myself putting on the same old pair
of Levis morning after morning. It’s not that I like these
better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to
wind up wearing them most of the time.

Every designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like

comfortable jeans: they go with everything, they seem to
adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or A large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a
more formal as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to range of voices and emotions. Versatile and comfortable to work
come out of the closet day after day. Usually, these are
with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers.
faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold,
etc) and/or cuts (Italic, Condensed, etc). My particular
safety blankets are: Myriad3, Gotham4, DIN5,Akzidenz
Grotesk6 and Interstate7 among the sans; Mercury8, Electra9
and Perpetua10 among the serif faces.
2. Know Your Families: Grouping Fonts

The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop
some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across.
Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories (Scotch Modern, anybody?), but we only really need to
keep track of five groups to establish a working understanding of the majority of type being used in the present-day
landscape.
The following list is not meant as a comprehensive classification of each and every category of type (there are plenty of great
sites on the web that already tackle this, such as Typedia’s type classifications14) but rather as a manageable shorthand
overview of key groups. Let’s look at two major groups without serifs (serifs being the little feet at the ends of the
letterforms), two with serifs, and one outlier (with big, boxy feet).

Geometric Sans
I’m actually combining three different groups here
(Geometric, Realist and Grotesk), but there is enough in
common between these groups that we can think of them as
one entity for now. Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces
that are based on strict geometric forms. The individual
letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are
all the same width and frequently evidence a kind of “less is
more” minimalism in their design.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern,

universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. A classic
Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s
impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice
about whether or not we’d like to live there.
Examples of Geometric/Realist/Grotesk Sans: Helvetica,
Univers, Futura, Avant Garde, Akzidenz Grotesk, Franklin
Gothic, Gotham.

2. Humanist Sans
These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting —
as clean and modern as some of them may look, they still
retain something inescapably human at their root. Compare
the ‘t’ in the image above to the ‘t’ in ‘Geometric’ and note
how much more detail and idiosyncrasy the Humanist ‘t’
has.
This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas
Geometric Sans are typically designed to be as simple as
possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have
more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner
and thicker stoke weights — after all they come from our
handwriting, which is something individuated. At their best,
Humanist Sans manage to have it both ways: modern yet
human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem
wishy-washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate
insincerity.
Examples of Humanist Sans: Gill Sans, Frutiger, Myriad,
Optima, Verdana.
3. Old Style
Also referred to as ‘Venetian’, these are our oldest
typefaces, the result of centuries of incremental
development of our calligraphic forms. Old Style faces are
marked by little contrast between thick and thin (as the
technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and the
curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy
tilts). Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional,
readable and at their worst are… well, classic and
traditional.
Examples of Old Style: Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and —
especially — Garamond, which was considered so perfect
at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to
improve on it for a century and a half.

4. Transitional and Modern

An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional (mid
18th Century) and Modern (late 18th century, not to be
confused with mid 20th century modernism) typefaces
emerged as type designers experimented with making their
letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the
unassuming faces of the Old Style period. Transitional
faces marked a modest advancement in this direction —
although Baskerville, a quintessential Transitional typeface,
appeared so sharp to onlookers that people believed it could
hurt one’s vision to look at it.
In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a
kind of virtuosic demonstration of contrasting thick and thin
strokes — much of the development was spurred by a
competition between two rival designers who cut similar
faces, Bodoni and Didot. At their best, transitional and
modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst,
they seem neither here nor there — too conspicuous and
baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.
Examples of transitional typefaces: Times New Roman,
Baskerville. Examples of Modern serifs: Bodoni, Didot.

5. Slab Serifs
Also known as ‘Egyptian’ (don’t ask), the Slab Serif is a
wild card that has come strongly back into vogue in recent
years. Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans
faces (that is, simple forms with relatively little contrast
between thick and thin) but with solid, rectangular shoes
stuck on the end. Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that
they convey very specific — and yet often quite
contradictory — associations: sometimes the thinker,
sometimes the tough guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes
the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes the
cowboy.
They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy
versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly,
as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to
express an urban character (such as Rockwell, Courier and
Lubalin), but when applied in a different context (especially
Clarendon) they strongly recall the American Frontier and
the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos
from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as
a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function
something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a
distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become
overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.
Examples of Slab Serifs: Clarendon, Rockwell, Courier,
Lubalin Graph, Archer.
3. Don’t Be a Wimp: The Principle of Decisive Contrast
So, now that we know our families and some classic
examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match
and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at
all. Most of the time, one typeface will do, especially if it’s
one of our workhorses with many different weights that
work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a
second face to the mix, it’s always good to observe this
simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot —
avoid wimpy, incremental variations.

This is a general principle of design, and its official name is

correspondence and contrast. The best way to view this
rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected
in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a
table together. If you put two identical coins next to each
other, they look good together because they match
(correspondence). On the other hand, if we put a dime next
to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere
in Central Europe, this also looks interesting because of the
contrast between the two — they look sufficiently different.
What doesn’t work so well is when put our dime next to a
coin from another country that’s almost the same size and
color but slightly different. This creates an uneasy visual
relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely
register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the
question of whether these two are the same or not, and that
process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply
viewing.

When we combine multiple typefaces on a design, we want

them to coexist comfortably — we don’t want to distract
the viewer with the question, are these the same or not? We
can start by avoiding two different faces from within one of
the five categories that we listed above all together — two
geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not
exactly alike, these two are also not sufficiently different
and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-
nor-there place.

If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with
Helvetica, much better if we use something like Bembo, a
classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years
apart in terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have
enough contrast to comfortably share a page:

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different — placing our candy cane font next to, say,
Garamond or Caslon does not guarantee us typographic harmony. Often, as in the above example of Helvetica and Bembo,
there’s no real explanation for why two faces complement each other — they just do.
But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have
one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke
weight) or it can be chronological. Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working well
together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

Continued on next page…

4. A Little Can Go a Long Way
‘Enough with all these conventional-looking fonts
and rules!’ you say. ‘I need something for my rave
flyer! And my Thai restaurant menu! And my
Christmas cards!’ What you’re pointing out here is
that all the faces I’ve discussed so far are ‘body
typefaces’, meaning you could conceivably set a
whole menu or newspaper with any of them; in the
clothing analogy presented in part one, these are
our everyday Levis. What of our Halloween
flares?

Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes

with personality, whether that personality is
warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And
this need brings us into the vast wilderness of
Display typefaces, which includes everything from
Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts.
‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not
exceed recommended dosage‘: applied sparingly
to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed
dash of flavor to a design, but it can quickly wear
out its welcome if used too widely.
Time for another clothing analogy:

Betsey’s outfit works because the pink belts acts as

an accent and is offset by the down-to-earthiness
of blue jeans. But if we get carried away and
slather Betsey entirely in pink, she might wind up
looking something like this:

Let’s call this the Pink Belt Principle of Type:

display faces with lots of personality are best used
in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to
every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal
of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet —
your design becomes very hard to read.

Let’s say we’re designing a menu for our favorite

corner Thai place. Our client might want us to use
a ‘typically’ Asian display face, like Sho:

So far, so good. But look

what happens when we apply
our prized font choice to the
entire menu(left)

Enough already. Let’s try

replacing some of the rank-
and-file text copy with
something more neutral
(right)

That’s better. Now that we’ve

reined in the usage of our star
typeface, we’ve allowed it to
shine again.
5. Rule Number Five Is ‘There Are No Rules’
Really. Look hard enough and you will find a dazzling-looking menu set entirely in a hard-to-read display font. Or of two
different Geometric Sans faces living happily together on a page (in fact, just this week I wound up trying this on a project
and was surprised to find that it hit the spot). There are only conventions, no ironclad rules about how to use type, just as
there are no rules about how we should dress in the morning. It’s worth trying everything just to see what happens — even
wearing your Halloween flares to your court date.
In Conclusion
Hopefully, these five principles will have given you some guidelines for how to select, apply and mix type — and, indeed,
whether to mix it at all. In the end, picking typefaces requires a combination of understanding and intuition, and — as with
any skill — demands practice. With all the different fonts we have access to nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there’s nothing
like a classic typeface used well by somebody who knows how to use it.
Some of the best type advice I ever received came early on from my first typography teacher: pick one typeface you like and
use it over and over for months to the exclusion of all others. While this kind of exercise can feel constraining at times, it can
also serve as a useful reminder that the quantity of available choices in the internet age is no substitute for quality.

Other Resources
You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:
• Typedia Type Classifications14
A more extensive list of different categories and sub-categories of typefaces than the simplified version presented in
this article.
• So You Need A Typeface?31
Useful — and humorous — flowchart for selecting type, brought to you by Julian Hansen via Inspiration Lab.
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst32
Link to the Amazon.com order page for this 1992 classic.
• What Type Are You?33
Pentagram’s patented personality test.
• Best Practices of Combining Typefaces34
This articles takes a close look at some of the best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to
avoid.