What a weak post. I'm going to spend a career alternating between Helvetica and Akzidenz? Clarendon (really?) and Rockwell? Why? Why would a designer ever use "Avant Garde"? What's the last major thing to ever use Optima?
Some of these faces seem terribly out of fashion (Optima, Rotis, Clarendon). Some of them seem useful only if you're going to set printed books (Bembo, Garamond). Some of them are so closely related (Akzidenz and Helvetica, Univers Avenir and Frutiger) that it's hard to see why all of them are here.
But what really bugs me about this post is that it contains no content. Choose whatever faces you want; you're supposedly the expert, blog writer! Just tell us something about them when you do.
I don't think it was a great article by any stretch, but you're sounding really foolish.
Helvetica and Akzidenz (and Universe/Avenir/Frutiger, Clarendon/Rockwell) are plenty different. And yes, there are designers that spend their careers alternating between a few similar typefaces. Just because two typefaces have similarities doesn't mean they both can't be useful in different situations.
Clarendon was recently chosen by Pitchfork, purveyors of cool, for their logo. Ruby Tuesday also went through a rebrand with Clarendon within the last year or two. Wells Fargo does fine with it. Modest Mouse and Belle and Sebastian have used it on album covers. Typography is subjective, but what exactly is your problem with it? It's very clearly still relevant.
"Why would a designer ever use Avant Garde"
That's a pretty ignorant statement. If you look at the portfolios of mondernist designers from the last 5 years, Avant Garde would probably appear as often as anything but Helvetica.
I'd expect that someone delivering such harsh criticism would at least be an expert on the subject, but I went to the Matasano homepage and found a hodgepodge of 4 or 5 different sans-serifs, sloppy tracking and leading...no wonder.
Are you commenting on my taste in typography (trust me, mine is worse than the web site for my software security company, which I didn't do[1]), or the post?
(You've got me dead to rights on Avant Garde, but I don't think your case is as solid with Clarendon; isn't Pitchfork using it ironically? Clearly Ruby Tuesday is.)
My criticism is about the post. You clearly could write an excellent post like this, and you should. This author didn't. There's no context to any of its selections. There's no information about any of its selections. Some of them (Univers/Avenir/Frutiger, Helvetica/Akzidenz) seem suspect because they're too similar. "Here I've made a collection of every face I've seen used on Underconsideration.com, added 1 sentence to each, and started soaking up the link juice".
You can beat up on me --- an avowed non-designer --- all you want, but I'm not the one getting articles like this flung to the top of Google's search results for cash.
[1] I wouldn't beat up on our designers too much, since we (a) gave them a wordmark set in Avenir to work with and (b) very haphazardly converted their output to Haml/Sass. Believe me when I say that the people who pay us don't care that much.
I'm not really commenting on your taste or the article, but the manner in which you criticized the article. I agree that the article lacked substance and isn't deserving of so many upvotes. However, your comments about specific fonts were made in a matter-of-fact way that suggested you were a designer or typography expert. It gets a bunch of upvotes, and the programmers on here come away from the comments thinking that Clarendon and Avant Garde are irrelevant, etc., when the truth might be the opposite. My comment regarding your website was only to make the point that, suspect as the OP might be, your comments should be taken with a grain of salt as well.
Yeah, not so fast, font geek. Defend your argument.
Seriously, you think Clarendon is a great "back pocket", "top of my tool drawer" typeface for designers to be using? Because Pitchfork and Ruby Tuesday use it? Put a bevel on Ruby Tuesday's mark and you could add a cowboy hat and a lasso to complete their thought.
Is there a Clarendon revival I'm missing, or are you just jumping on me because you think I'm bashing the typefaces and not the author of this post? You obviously are an expert, and should have no trouble setting me straight.
Seriously, you think Clarendon is a great "back pocket", "top of my tool drawer" typeface for designers to be using?
If I'm theoretically limited to only 25 typefaces, there should be room for a few slab-serifs, and I don't see why Clarendon couldn't be one of them. It's a classic slab-serif in the same way that Helvetica and Akzidenz are classic sans-serifs. I don't think it's great because Pitchfork and Ruby Tuesday use it, I'm saying that it's more relevant than you suggested. Designers, somehow, ARE using it.
Maybe there is a Clarendon revival. Don't forget that trends are a big part of graphic design, as they are in any design industry. Helvetica, Avant Garde, Clarendon go in and out of style just like tapered jeans, Ray-Bans, and plaid shirts.
And in 25 typefaces with a few slab serifs, you'd do Clarendon before Archer, PMN Caecilia (best ital ever), Joanna, or Chaparral? More to the point --- bringing it back to the post --- if the other slab you were stuck with was Rockwell, you'd use Clarendon as your backup? Two faces that would both look at home on a WPA-era wrought iron factory gate?
What parts of my criticism are wrong? I'm sure there's lots wrong, and I'm happy to be called out, as long as I'm going to learn something from it.
That's a purely subjective matter. I might like the typefaces you mentioned more than Clarendon, but I don't think it's absurd for someone to think Clarendon is a good one to have. Why did Pitchfork and Wells Fargo and Ruby Tuesday choose Clarendon instead of those fonts? I'm not sure, maybe they just decided it was a better fit. Erik Spiekermann thinks Helvetica is terrible — is he right? I don't know...some people love it.
Maybe Clarendon and Rockwell are redundant in the context of the article, but you said that Clarendon was "terribly out fashion", and "really?". That's what I was responded to.
The parts of your criticism that are wrong are the ones that are either not based in reality, or personal opinions stated as fact.
It's funny to me, because I originally wrote (Optima, Rotis) and re-read the post 5 minutes later after re-reading the post and edited Clarendon onto the list. I went out of my way to annoy you! I may have an irrational hatred of Clarendon.
"I wouldn't beat up on our designers too much, since we gave them a wordmark set in Avenir to work with."
What's wrong with Avenir? There's nothing wrong with that typeface and it's just plain weird to try blame it for why Matasano's home page is a super wordy giant wall of text.
I inherited a logo set in Avenir at the day gig, so we used Cufón to work it into the rest of the site and whatever else you might say about it, you probably wouldn't call our stuff undesigned:
I worked on a web project recently that used Avant Garde in the branding. I have never had so much difficulty trying to make body type hang with branding. Anyway, I came across this quote:
How is Optima inherently evil? Used properly (e.g. printed at high resolution on glossy paper for some art book, or printed letterpress) it’s absolutely gorgeous.
"Marks & Spencer (M&S) is a major British retailer, with over 895 stores in more than 40 territories around the world, over 600 domestic and 295 international.[3][4] The company, with its head office in the Waterside House in the City of Westminster, London, England,[5][6] is the largest clothing retailer in the United Kingdom, as well as being an upmarket food retailer, and as of 2008, the 43rd largest retailer in the world.[7] Most of its domestic stores sell both clothing and food, and since the turn of the century it has started expanding into other ranges such as homewares, furniture and technology."
Maybe you are just more creative than the regular designers... but most of the best designers I know (people who made graphic design history) use even just a fraction of these typefaces.
I wouldn't place myself anywhere close the level of those designers, but if I look at the works I've done (I'm mostly designer) in the past two years, I can say in 90% of them I used one of those fonts. For the remaining 10% I mostly used Museo and few others.
Seriously, not snarkily: case in point. Their visual identity was ridiculed during the campaign (Obama's campaign famously used HF+J Gotham, which has since become a design cliche because of overuse by designers).
Optima is a very famous typeface. It's probably the most famous humanist sans --- these are faces that try to capture the quirks of handwriting or calligraphy. The uppercase letters mimic carved-in-stone Roman letters. Because it has serif-y features (flared terminals in particular) it's notoriously hard to harmonize with other faces. Every designer in the world can spot it on sight.
In general, look at the contrast in weights (where do the lines get thinner and thicker) and the axis of those contrasts (is the "hand" drawing the letter positioned at an angle?). In a Sans, you can also eyeball how "geometric" the letters are; is the "o" a perfect circle, for instance?
Even if you're not a designer (I'm definitely not), it's worth it to buy a copy of Bringhurst's _Elements of Typography_; it's a beautifully written and designed little book.
nod Can't recommend Robert Bringhurst's 'The Elements of Typographic Style'[1] enough. 'A Short History of the Printed Word' is also good, but I've found the former to be indispensable.
Getting to know typefaces is much like getting to know any other visual art - some distinctions are highly visible and obvious (modernist versus baroque, punk versus techno) while others are more subtle (folk-pop versus folk-rock) due to the general shifting and swirling of aesthetic trends.
If you're really interested in identifying typefaces, get at least conversationally familiar with the technical terms for different parts of letterforms: serifs, bowls, counters, shoulders, etc.: http://www.fontshop.com/glossary/ Look at instances of typefaces you see around you, try and identify the different parts and see if any of them are particularly notable.
Some of the more obvious things I've learned: The bowl of Palatino's P doesn't quite meet the stem, unlike most other serif faces. Optima's strokes have a gentle concavity to them, unlike most other sans-serif faces. Gill Sans tends to be wider than the Platonic sans-serif face, and the tips of C and G are sliced off with a vertical stroke, leaving quite pointy terminals behind. Helvetica's most famous birthmarks are the surprisingly complete tail on the lowercase a (compare to Arial's a) and the surreal curly tail on R.
Of course, some typefaces are even more subtle than that. If you showed me Baskerville and Times New Roman, I could probably tell you which was which, even if I couldn't identify Baskerville on its own. Distinguishing between the hundreds of typefaces in the Bodoni/Didot genre is way beyond me.
Anyway, if you want to learn more about typography, I heartily recommend picking up a copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst - if you're a practicing graphic designer, it's got lots of useful information; if you're not, it's a book by a typographer with decades of experience who also happens to be a well-known poet, writing about something he's passionately interested in, so you know it's going to be a good read.
I like walking around the mall after a day of work and examining the typefaces used in all the store windows. I am a programmer first, so its probably pretty boring to the average designer. For me, its like there is this whole new world [typography] that I didn't know existed. I always thought it was "just words", much like how I thought cooking was "just following a recipe" (Cooking is my other personal interest outside of coding).
Typographers can tell. For others, there are sites such as http://new.myfonts.com/ and http://www.identifont.com/identify.html. I own a printed variant of such a tool: the book "The Typefinder". Far from being an expert, I do not know whether it is any good (google learns me that it has a foreword by Frutiger, so It cannot be really bad), but I find it entertaining and educational. Among other information, it gives the most distinctive characters for each type, with arrows and dotted lines pointing out what to look for.
I quite like FontShop.de’s list of best fonts (http://www.100besteschriften.de/), it has much more diversity and interesting background information for every font that made the list.
Sales numbers (40%), history (30%) and aesthetics (30%) were criteria, the usual limitation of those kinds of lists apply and FontShop is obviously a commercial operation. Oh, and it seems like the list is still only available in German which is unfortunate. Last I heard (three years ago) FontShop.com was supposed to put a translated version up but it seems they never have. They have the domain (http://100bestfonts.com/) so it might still happen.
But for what it's worth, that's a totally different kind of list. Optima and Gill Sans (but definitely not Eurostile and Rotis) probably are two of the greatest typefaces of all time, but that doesn't mean a design that relies on them won't look terribly dated and tired.
Some faces (Helvetica Univers) are probably timeless. Others, like Futura, speak clearly to a different era, and manage to be evocative without being retro. But a lot of these typefaces are neither of those good things.
You won’t become Timbaland with a list of the 100 best pop songs of all time and you won’t become a great designer with a list of the 100 best typefaces of all time.
Some of these faces seem terribly out of fashion (Optima, Rotis, Clarendon). Some of them seem useful only if you're going to set printed books (Bembo, Garamond). Some of them are so closely related (Akzidenz and Helvetica, Univers Avenir and Frutiger) that it's hard to see why all of them are here.
But what really bugs me about this post is that it contains no content. Choose whatever faces you want; you're supposedly the expert, blog writer! Just tell us something about them when you do.