Author Topic: What is your preferred font? (Read 107870 times)

zridling · « **on:** September 04, 2009, 01:01 AM »

There are about ten basic fonts that people tend to use with browsers, which makes me curious: What is your font preference for (1) screen/browser and (2) print?

................................................................

For readability, I like Neue Frutiger, since it looks great on both Linux and Windows machines.

lanux128 · « **Reply #1 on:** September 04, 2009, 01:51 AM »

i guess my frequently-used fonts would be Calibri, Consolas, Lucida, Terminal and Dina. will post a screenie if i've got the time later.

CleverCat · « **Reply #2 on:** September 04, 2009, 01:53 AM »

Tahoma 15...

skwire · « **Reply #3 on:** September 04, 2009, 02:40 AM »

My preferred fonts include:

Development: ProFontWindows 8pt.
Mono-width: 東風明朝 / 東風ゴシック (Kochi Mincho / Kochi Gothic) 8pt.
Proportional: Verdana 7pt, Tahoma 8pt.

I'm not a fan at all of ClearType or ClearType fonts such as Calibri or Consolas.

f0dder · « **Reply #4 on:** September 04, 2009, 03:32 AM »

Dina while coding, Courier New for xplorer^2, not much preference for anything else. I do tend to prefer serif fonts for both screen and print, though.

tranglos · « **Reply #5 on:** September 04, 2009, 09:33 AM »

Verdana and some Tahoma for the UI.

Verdana for reading text in the Firefox.

Courier New 12pt for email and for any text I'm typing myself. I've tried a number of monospaced replacements of Courier, but none feels as good. The free Courier substitutes are often a little narrower (denser), hence less legible. If I can't type in Courier New for whatever reason, I settle for Arial.

Courier New for printouts as well, but I only fire up the printer a dozen times a year or so.

(Not too original, I suppose, except perhaps for my fondness for monospaced text)

40hz · « **Reply #6 on:** September 04, 2009, 09:46 AM »

- For general screen use: Verdana or Tahoma.
Bland and functional. Nothing much to like or dislike about either. Both fonts are easy to read.

- For technical screen use: Dina
Finally a san serif font where it's easy to tell the difference between the number one and the lower case L!

- For print (everyday): Day Roman by Apostrophic Labs
www.fontspace.com/apostrophic-lab/day-roman

A very clear, beautifully designed serif. And the price is right too. It's free!

- For print (publication): the Minion font family from Linotype

www.linotype.com/1236/minion-family.html

Learned about this font back in the days when I was very heavily involved in graphic design and publishing. Minion is easily one of the most complete, elegant, and readable designs ever created. Not cheap by any stretch. Especially if you opt for the entire family of 93 fonts ($275). But IMHO, Minion is still worth every penny. Individual fonts within the family are available at a very reasonable $26 each.

Veign · « **Reply #7 on:** September 04, 2009, 10:26 AM »

Consolas - This is my preferred font for development IDE's

johnk · « **Reply #8 on:** September 04, 2009, 10:29 AM »

Screen: Verdana, Tahoma, Calibri.

Print: Constantia mainly (very nice). Actually I think most of the fonts MS introduced in their Office 2007 pack are good, solid fonts. But Constantia is the gem.

Monospace: Courier New is superb on screen, but horrible in print -- thin and spindly. Decent Courier print fonts are harder to find. You will find that this is discussed in exhaustive detail on screenwriting forums, as scripts are still always printed in 12pt Courier. I have a few different Courier versions on my system to use for monospace printing. For anyone who is interested, there's an "all you ever wanted to know" essay on Courier fonts for printing (including a comparison of different fonts) here.

These days, whenever I start using a new text editor, I make sure it has an option to use different fonts for screen and print.

Another monospace font worth mentioning is Inconsolata, an interesting print font for programmers. Consolas is good on screen for code.

EDIT: Forgot to mention another wonderfully elegant print font I use regularly: Adobe's Garamond Premier Pro. Beautiful, and excellent "readability".

I seem to remember getting this as a freebie when I bought Photoshop. It's one of the best freebies I've ever received. I received the entire set, which I see has a retail price of $200...

zridling · « **Reply #9 on:** September 04, 2009, 04:10 PM »

- For print (everyday): Day Roman by Apostrophic Labs

- For print (publication): the Minion font family from Linotype
www.linotype.com/1236/minion-family.html
-40hz (September 04, 2009, 09:46 AM)

Wow, nice tastes. Never heard of either. Love how they designed the numbers.

40hz · « **Reply #10 on:** September 04, 2009, 06:27 PM »

Wow, nice tastes. Never heard of either. Love how they designed the numbers.
-zridling (September 04, 2009, 04:10 PM)

Glad you liked it. Everyone I've shown Day Roman to loves those old-style descenders on the numbers. It's probably DR's biggest 'selling' point.

BTW: If you liked Minion, also check out a font family from Linotype called Fairfield. This one is a little less fleshy with 'only' 20 fonts in the collection.
http://www.linotype....airfield-family.html

Yet another drop-dead gorgeous serif font. Keeps the best of traditional serif designs, but also adds a slightly more modern set of improvements. One of the better choices for text when you're setting type for a book. Fairfield was specifically designed to be highly legible. My tired eyes appreciate seeing Fairfield every time I come across it in a book or magazine article. Also a little $$$, but again, still worth it. My second favorite after Minion - with my old flame Garamond coming in a close third.

Fairfield was designed by Rudolf Ruzicka, a gentleman who created another beautiful font called Lake Informal which is also published by Linotype.
http://www.linotype....07/lakeinformal.html

Lake Informal is an excellent choice for giving text a handwritten look. It also mixes well with more formal typefaces and plays quite nicely with Minion.

and...I'm gonna stop now. I can go on and on about fonts for hours....

But you probably already figured that out didn't you?

f0dder · « **Reply #11 on:** September 05, 2009, 03:07 AM »

Hm, Day Roman... what's with 6 and 8 floating above the rest? Also, 0 looks way too much like an o, and 1 like I.

Paul Keith · « **Reply #12 on:** September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM »

As a non-expert on fonts, I always get a headache when switching fonts but everytime I was put in a position where I just want to rip everything apart, I always settled on Arial as lame as that probably is for font enthusiasts.

I'm not kidding. Sure I can tolerate alot of these fonts and I currently have Verdana in Opera and of course Times New Roman is default in MS Word but when you put a gun to my head, I always default to Arial. It just seems like the font that gives me the least headache regardless of text size, text zoom and text formatting.

app103 · « **Reply #13 on:** September 05, 2009, 12:38 PM »

As a non-expert on fonts, I always get a headache when switching fonts but everytime I was put in a position where I just want to rip everything apart, I always settled on Arial as lame as that probably is for font enthusiasts.
-Paul Keith (September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM)

I have received my share of criticism for my love of Arial. I tend to change the font to Arial in anything and everything that lets me change the default font. (The only exception would be in my IDE, where I use Dina.)

I just find that Arial is a very comfortable font to look at for long periods of time. Other fonts tend to make my eyes tired, rather quickly.

When creating something where I want a bit of a fancier more script-like font (graphics), I tend to choose either Adorable or Harrington more than any other.

I don't really print much so I can't really say what my preference would be for that.

40hz · « **Reply #14 on:** September 05, 2009, 01:05 PM »

Hm, Day Roman... what's with 6 and 8 floating above the rest?
-f0dder (September 05, 2009, 03:07 AM)

That's a typographic style element called an ascender. It's cousin to the descender which is the exact opposite.

http://www.fonts.com...sary/_glossary_A.htm

ascender
The part of a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height, usually continuous with a main stroke. The letters b, d, f, h, k, and l have ascenders; i and j do not. (The letter t, which has a shorter projection above the x-height, is often not classified with other ascending letters.) The old-style numerals 6 and 8 also have ascenders because they extend above 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9.

40hz · « **Reply #15 on:** September 05, 2009, 01:32 PM »

I always get a headache when switching fonts but everytime I was put in a position where I just want to rip everything apart, I always settled on Arial as lame as that probably is for font enthusiasts.
-Paul Keith (September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM)

I have received my share of criticism for my love of Arial.
-app103 (September 05, 2009, 12:38 PM)

Sod the snobs and enthusiasts. I sometimes think of myself as a connoisseur of fine typography. (So much so that I had to look up the spelling of the word connoisseur

) But I'll never diss anyone for liking Ariel. Especially since there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. It's a very workmanlike font - and one of the better screen fonts for web use.

I think it's also important to distinguish between what works well on screen as opposed to what works well in print. They're two completely different things. And the overall design and optical considerations should reflect that. Screen resolution is usually 96-dpi. Print resolution can range anywhere from 1200 dpi on up to the absolute resolution of the output device and media.

Ariel was primarily designed to be a screen font. As a result, it's metrics and kerning are optimized for screen resolutions. IMHO, it doesn't look that great when you print it out at 1200 dpi (especially when you compare it to 'printer fonts' such as Helvetica or Univers), but that's just a matter of personal taste. If you grew up on TrueType fonts and laser printers, I doubt you'd have the issues the old typesetting crowd has with Ariel. Again, it's just a matter of taste - and what you've been taught to look for in a font. Neither is intrinsically better. They're just different.

And besides, it's all about readability. At least in my book. One of the biggest complaints I have (with a lot of what passes for 'graphic design') is the tendency of many designers to treat text as just another graphic element. Text is not a graphic. Text is meant to be read. And anything that interferes with that is poor design.

So when people say things like:

I just find that Arial is a very comfortable font to look at for long periods of time. Other fonts tend to make my eyes tired, rather quickly.
-app103 (September 05, 2009, 12:38 PM)

and...

I'm not kidding. Sure I can tolerate alot of these fonts and I currently have Verdana in Opera and of course Times New Roman is default in MS Word but when you put a gun to my head, I always default to Arial. It just seems like the font that gives me the least headache regardless of text size, text zoom and text formatting.
-Paul Keith (September 05, 2009, 12:01 PM)

...it just makes me wonder what possible argument anybody can really make against a font like Ariel?

Fonts are like wine. What's the best? Answer: the one you like.

Paul Keith · « **Reply #16 on:** September 05, 2009, 02:23 PM »

Okay, it's the third time in a row I added wow to something I posted in the internet but @40hz, wow...

Eóin · « **Reply #17 on:** September 05, 2009, 03:45 PM »

For me it's usually Calibri for Windows Interface. Size 8 primarily as it increases the amount of screen real estate available. Candara is not without it's charm for the same purpose and I do switch to it from time to time. I find both are very easy on the eyes.

For printed text I use Calibri a lot again, it's the default in Word 2007 anyway. Serifs are nice too of course but most things I print are articles or documents just that bit too long of screen reading and invariably I tend to use sans-serifs almost all the time.

For programming I use either Consolas or more often MS Reference Sans. It comes with Office 2007 and for C++ coding in VS it can't be beaten. And yes, it is variable width (I can hear cries of blasphemy already).

f0dder · « **Reply #18 on:** September 05, 2009, 03:51 PM »

Eóin: how on earth can you live with a variable width font for coding? BLASPHEMER! Hell, for coding, anything else than Dina is blasphemy in my eyes.

PS: that memcpy()ing code looks somewhat dirty to me

Eóin · « **Reply #19 on:** September 05, 2009, 05:00 PM »

Not my code actually, I think it's from a WTL header

I find a variable width font very pleasant to work with. You can still use tabs for indentation and other alignment but as I read somewhere online when contemplating the switch- once things stop lining up you stop wanting them to line up.

Choosing the font was hard though. Most don't have enough space around punctuation, symbols and brackets which is really needed for coding where these thing occur in high densities. After a lenghty online search it turned out the perfect font was already on my PC, MS Reference Sans Serif comes with Office 2007.

CWuestefeld · « **Reply #20 on:** September 05, 2009, 06:00 PM »

That Day Roman is pretty, but the "1" I could never live with. It's just too much like a capital "I".

If you like the descending numbers, take a look at Georgia. That's the font I use for reading ebooks on my PocketPC (I've gone through minor headaches to ensure that I've always had this font on whatever I do reading on).

xtabber · « **Reply #21 on:** September 05, 2009, 08:15 PM »

For a proportional on-screen font, I like either Arial or Verdana, both of which are better optimized for the screen than any of the better looking print typefaces.. Arial is tighter spaced than Verdana, so the choice depends on the application, e.g., Arial for writing, Verdana for reading web pages.

For a mono-spaced font, my choice has long been Andale Mono, which I find far easier on the eyes than any Courier variant, and which also makes it easy to distinguish between O (Oh) and 0 (Zero), and between 1 (one) and l (lower-case L).

mahesh2k · « **Reply #22 on:** September 06, 2009, 02:26 AM »

Some of my fav are :

Corbel, Callibri, Verdana, Lucida Grande

tomos · « **Reply #23 on:** September 06, 2009, 07:24 AM »

Ariel was primarily designed to be a screen font.
-40hz (September 05, 2009, 01:32 PM)

I always thought Arial was a fairly straight rip-off of Helvetica,
but I see Wikipedia agrees with you:-

Though nearly identical to Linotype Helvetica in both proportion and weight (see figure), the design of Arial is in fact a variation of Monotype Grotesque,[3] and was designed for IBM's laserxerographic printer.[2] Subtle changes and variations were made to both the letterforms and the spacing between characters, in order to make it more readable on screen and at various resolutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial

40hz · « **Reply #24 on:** September 06, 2009, 07:54 AM »

For those of you who want to begin exploring the world of typography, here are some links to collections of free fonts to get you started:

http://apostrophiclab.pedroreina.net

www.dafont.com

www.urbanfonts.com

www.1001freefonts.com

www.fontsquirrel.com

www.fontspace.com

There many other font sites up on the web, but these links get repeatedly mentioned in various design articles. Worth a look.

I'd also suggest checking out www.deviantart.com Although not a 'font site' per sce, many of the contributing artists have taken a crack at font design. Browse around while you're there. Some of the creative works on display at DeiviantArt are quite amazing.

Caution: constantly searching for 'the ideal font' can be habit forming.