since switching to office '07, i have really come to like calibri, the default.

(say hello, say hello, here comes the necromancer, say hello [and remember dead topics])

I did some font searching lately and I found an awesome sort-of sans-serif font called Fontin. I think it looks pretty awesome; what does anybody else think? Would it be a good font for a game?

While there doesn't seem too much founded input in here, compared to "I like font ABC!!!", let me try to give a bit of a generally cool link that I'm sure a lot of people not in graphic design business will profit from :p

So You Need A Typeface? (and yes, it's the original author's page)


That being said, I personally like Myriad Pro and Avenir a lot and use them for almost all my interface designs. Lately, Adobe Clean has caught my attention, though... it looks a lot better on typography-based interfaces than most of the others...
Obviously, if you don't have expensive professional font licenses around like I do... Verdana is a great choice as far as readability goes (especially for smaller font sizes, where Arial just fails), and for the Mac people, Helvetica does a slightly better job than Arial as well. If we are talking Helvetica, let me point you to Helvetica Neue (licensed font), which is the typeface you really want to use when you're selecting plain Helvetica from the list. I also agree on Calibri being a really great fit for most applications (Microsoft made a few very good font choices in the Vista era in general).
As these are all sans-serif fonts, let's also talk serif... Times New Roman works well for web design and shouldn't really be replaced no matter what in that area if serifs are what it's about. Off the web, Garamond is a really really cool and well-readable serif font, and Garamond Pro (again, licensed) does the job even better. Minion Pro (yes, licensed) is also quite snazzy, however quickly fails for lower font sizes.


And yes, Comic Sans is a bad font, from every professional viewpoint there is. If you don't agree, you're just one of the many people who can't see it. You'Re probably also one of the many people who think if many people don't see it it has to be a good font. Tough luck, my friend!

EDIT: Okay, slightly off-topic, but hey... someone will like it...

I like calibri a lot too. It looks really good with smaller font sizes.

comci sans

It burns my eyes.

@Wyatt: Exactly that is not the case. Just because you think a font looks good doesn't mean it does. That might sound strange at first, however I will provide an explanation for it now that it's being called for (sorry, Ven... I tried to honor your first page move... didn't quite work out ^^ )

The main problem with it is the evenness/lack of diversity in stroke width. It just throws letters at you the bulkiest way possible, making it a very unattractive font to look at especially in text blocks. That is especially important to mention when you say it makes a good hand-written font, which is basically just wrong - a handwritten font will never have a fixed stroke width. Even when print and on-screen fonts would both take that feature because humanity finally went insane, everyone would still have a handwriting with varying stroke width.
Next up, the spacing between individual letters (kerning) is quite unthoughtful. I just plopped it into Illustrator and applied optical kerning, which makes it look a little better... however you can still see that's something they didn't really bother with (try comparing 'ak' to 'fj'). Again, without kerning, it's even worse, and I'm yet to see a browser, game engine or whichever for print media that does optical kerning on the fly...
Last and maybe least, but still something that makes a typography artist choke is the optical horizontal lines drawn by the font. Your eyes are following the text like a 1880s train the tracks - bumpy and slow, with just enough guidance, and noone sees it because they don't know what trains they could be riding.

Please take a look at this page from a commercial comic publication. While similar in curve usage, it features varying stroke width, proper kerning, and even looks good as an all-caps font, which is a very hard-to-achieve task for font designers. Try putting a few sentences in capped Comic Sans next to it.

So, while not mentioning everything wrong with it, let me get to my point: Most people won't see this, because they probably never got in touch with what is important in a font, or actually designed one. Still, the font is what it is, and a viewer will notice it. If my lunch break wouldn't be limited, I would gladly draw you that comic page from above in Comic Sans, to have a side-by-side example... and believe it or not, but you would see a difference.


Also, this.

I disagree.

Although i don't believe comic sans to be that interesting typography-wise, i don't think you can say a font is a BAD font at all. The only thing you can say about a situation where you have to pick the right font for the job, is whether or not a certain font is more suited for the specific job. Now I DO agree with you on the fact that comic sans is a real pain in the ass to apply, but I'm sure it has a perfect fit, somewhere.

I'm quoting another article here, but the following lines describe my thoughts seeing this:



"which took my breath away — not because it is the most beautiful design I have ever seen, far from it, but because it was the first time that I have seen Comic Sans used well, even cool."

Pick your font for this message!

Times (116%):


Palatino (105%):


Garamond (120%):


Arial (105%):


Helvetica (105%):


Verdana (default, 100%):


Tahoma (108%):


Calibri (115%, if installed):


Fontin (106%, if installed):


Comic Sans (100%; yay trolling!):


Some fonts appear smaller or larger at the same font size; I've tried to keep the relative sizes looking the same. I've got some new ideas based on this exercise. Mainly, it's really convinced me that some fonts look better at a particular size. Usually, that size is the lowest size before the letters get too closely spaced. For example, Tahoma looks pretty bad in this comparison, but without correction it looks better (by my perception anyway). However, it looks even worse at very small sizes. So, I guess Tahoma looks best at about 13px (on my 1440x900 15" screen), the size on hbgames text boxes. With correction at this size, Garamond looks better than Palatino to me, but at smaller sizes Garamond starts to become less legible.

Garamond has like, the best italics

@Tomas: Yeah, you can't generally say a font is just bad. What you can say is that certain features are well-executed or badly executed, and the problem with Comic Sans is that it fails on almost all levels, if it even worries about them. Seriously, since I got a tablet and the required capable software around, I could make you a lousy font in minutes that would feature similar qualities than Comic Sans, and depending on how I do, you'd have more or less problems finding a single person who likes it. Comic Sans, for some reason, attracts a lot of attention even though it's a carelessly made typeface, and that's why people hate it... not because it's a bad font, because there's lots of fonts around made by people who don't know the beginning of typography.

For the image, I don't really see what exactly you see in the font usage there, but everything I said applies to those cardboard boxes just as to written text on white background... the flaws of the font are a bit covered up by the fact that the general layout is too messy to judge anything, but it's still the same old font. I think if you'd use the one from my comic example, it'd already look better, and I think that applies to almost every case where Comic Sans is used out there.


@Wyatt/rey: Fonts look different depending on the aliasing method used, but you don't judge a font based on how it looks in a Browser, but how it looks in natura, aka a vector-based font viewer of your choice, or even better, a layout program such as Illustrator or InDesign, to name some of the Adobe franchise. Photoshop is the wrong choice here, as it either displays font with pixelized corners or with certain, program-specific anti-aliasing methods. That's because it optimizes the font to be displayed in pixels, while vector-based programs don't touch the appearance of the font.

I know you're speaking from a professional point of view but saying "you don't judge based on x" is silly because, well, I do judge, based on their actual uses and how they look to me. It's all very well looking at things from a theoretical point of view, but that's no replacement for eyesight and personal opinion.

Well, my initial preference for Tahoma over Verdana is based on trying it out in MS Word at 12pt. That may not be the same as looking at it in Illustrator, though. And I know there are ways to mess with font display in the browser (like line height) but what's wrong with trying to compare with the browser where those attributes are more or less constant? More importantly, what if the target display is through a web browser? When looking for fonts for a web page, shouldn't display in a browser be the most important way to judge? On that note, I'm excited to see that modern browsers support CSS3 embedded fonts back a fair way, and IE supports a proprietary version using .eot fonts, so it's definitely possible now to choose any free font one can find on the internet (or licensed fonts if they are allowed to be distributed; the idea of .eot fonts is apparently to make it harder to redistribute fonts embedded this way so you can use more restricted fonts).

@Wyatt: It's not silly, because you just don't know how a font will look in whatever environment your reader, for example, will see it. If you say "Hey, my eyesight and personal opinion tells me this is a kick-ass font in Firefox on Windows!", than that doesn't really bother someone browing your page with Safari on a Mac - if they have the font installed at all. Then, it's IE vs Firefox, which have radically different aliasing methods. And lots of other stuff too...

@rey (and kind of Wyatt): Sure you have to choose web fonts by how they look on the web. Still, if you go by their actual font appearance, you can tell if it will look good later on, or if it's just a failure to use because of whichever. I mean, you do do that, I bet - you don't try out every font on your computer for your webpage, make a screenshot of each and later compare them, but instead, you preselect. If a font has serifs, appears too slim or too bold, you never select it in the first place. All I really do different is that I look at it in a vector preview (which you might be doing just as well, btw, for example in Win7's font viewer - that I find pretty useable, btw!).

And yeah, you can use different fonts than the default in multiple ways, I'm aware. Yet, you have to pay attention to what you're using, as I don't think you're allowed to use a Myriad Pro on a web page, regardless if you pack it in an eot file or not...I mean, you would be redistributing it, even for others just to use on their webpages, for example.

Interesting thought - if one were to remove every font on their computer and replace them with, say, http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/mostdownloaded, I wonder what impact it would have on their work.

I mean... are there any "free" fonts in Windows? I just kinda assumed since they gave them you you could use them.

Hm, good question really, never really thought about it... there even is a Microsoft FAQ on the matter, which I understand as every font is property of their respective font artist, and to use them you have to get a license from them. Obviously, since the occasions where you actually need to redistribute a Windows default font (with the exception of the Vista ones) are quite scarce... or am I missing something?

Also interesting: The list of fonts you linked has a font pretty similar in qualities (or non-qualities ;) ) as Comic Sans, which would be ubuntu-title...

Well, using them in logos and other graphics which embed an image of the font and don't just call it from the Fonts directory is a bit different I guess, which is more where the problem lies.

For redistributing fonts, that really just means packaging the font for someone else to use. It doesn't count if you send a Word document that says "please use X font if you have it;" the person loading it presumably has their own license to use the font so it's OK (they do if it's a Windows font and they're on Windows, in which case they have the font). What wouldn't be allowed is giving people a Powerpoint with embedded fonts, because they could then use the fonts themselves regardless of whether they have a license themselves. I don't think an image is wrong either, or else what kind of license would we be receiving? A license for only us to ever see the font? "Oh, you're not licensed to see what this font looks like...I'll just be taking those memories now!"

As for ubuntu-title, I guess it has some similarities but it's definitely used properly as a title for an operating system. Just the "ubuntu" part as displayed in the preview works pretty well as its used. I don't think it was ever intended as a general purpose font, if it was ever intended to have any glyphs at all besides those in "ubuntu".

As a disclaimer, never use these for anything that isn't deliberately low-res (and in fact, never use that second one for anything ever). Scaled-up pixelfonts are still (in my experience) less comfortable to read than regular vector ones.