Favoured typefaces

I had a peek at my MyFonts albums today and decided to share some of what I've got in them. I think designers are best to just buy, say, 5/6 typefaces from each style (serif/sans/slab) at most, and if they ever want something more jazzy or whatever then they can design it themselves!

By the way: MyFonts is really good for the What The Font? tool that it has – you can upload an image of text, tell it what each letter is, and it'll give you choices of typefaces that match it the closest. Handy if you‘ve seen a nice typeface in film credits – take a screenshot, upload it and bookmark the typeface.

I love the typeface ‘Dante‘ – think I‘ll actually spend my own money on that one at some point (never actually had to buy typefaces before now). Garamond, Dante, and Mrs Eaves are a good bunch to have. I read a book on Egon Schiele once and noticed how nice the type was – it was Mrs Eaves, and I didn‘t know at the time how common that one was. I like what Tschichold wrote in The New Typography but as far as getting rid of serif styles goes…no chance!

I have a few typefaces bookmarked with swiss-ish names, and they look pretty much like Helvetica so I‘d warn people with the same issue to check their similarity before buying in case you‘ve already got Helvetica. Grotesk Modern and Arial are pretty much the same as Helvetica, for a start. Another tip would be to steer away from most typefaces named after locations – as my tutor told me. They‘re usually crap.

Feel free post your own preferences in the comments - I‘ve left out Future, Univers, Garamond and Frutiger here because I already have them.