Fonts of wisdom
April 28, 2017 11:18 AM Subscribe
I was hoping to discover what wine went best with Helvetica.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:06 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:06 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
I was hoping to discover what wine went best with Helvetica.
Grüner Veltliner, obvs.
posted by gauche at 12:09 PM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]
Grüner Veltliner, obvs.
posted by gauche at 12:09 PM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]
I would keep seeing comic sans and other similar fonts that looked highly unprofessional in all sorts of contexts coming out of Africa - Economic Survey slides, govt office mobile apps, invoices et al, and only recently, on seeing the handpainted arch over the entrance to a University did I realize that 99% of the signage is handpainted and that's the norm. The choice of fonts were being made from familiarity of the looser flowing hand drawn scripts rather than the structure of the Gothic or angles of Bauhaus.
Culture and context matters ever so much, I'm discovering, in choice of font.
posted by infini at 12:27 PM on April 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
Culture and context matters ever so much, I'm discovering, in choice of font.
posted by infini at 12:27 PM on April 28, 2017 [9 favorites]
Uh, where's the punchline?
...
Oh, it's not a parody.
It's a nice summary of just-on-the-edge-of-overused condensed sans faces, though. Maybe this will push Roboto Condensed over the edge into the arms of Comic Sans and Papyrus. One may hope.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 12:32 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
...
Oh, it's not a parody.
It's a nice summary of just-on-the-edge-of-overused condensed sans faces, though. Maybe this will push Roboto Condensed over the edge into the arms of Comic Sans and Papyrus. One may hope.
posted by BrunoLatourFanclub at 12:32 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
A lot of these examples are just selling font variants, albeit nothing wrong with that if you're going for functional, unified look that doesn't call attention to itself.
Out of the real pairings, the ones that are nice are the handwritten font + sans serif font; there's something relaxing and inviting with that contrast. The rest I don't like so much... I used to do page design in a student club, but today I almost feel that the practice of mixing fonts belongs to a predigital era out of technological necessity, it's too jarring and superfluous to deliberately have different personalities/signatures on the same page.
posted by polymodus at 12:49 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
Out of the real pairings, the ones that are nice are the handwritten font + sans serif font; there's something relaxing and inviting with that contrast. The rest I don't like so much... I used to do page design in a student club, but today I almost feel that the practice of mixing fonts belongs to a predigital era out of technological necessity, it's too jarring and superfluous to deliberately have different personalities/signatures on the same page.
posted by polymodus at 12:49 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
I gave up on the OP, to be honest, when I saw the resume with the name going sideways. Completely unreadable in the 30 seconds a recruiter has to ditch your resume in the stay or go pile. I used tell my students that their name was not a design element to be placed wherever they liked but a functional piece of information that needed to be scanned instantly. Bah humbug.
posted by infini at 1:36 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by infini at 1:36 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
Well, yeah, this is not a page for professional designers, it's a page for non-designers to refer to when using Canva, an app designed to make professional designers obsolete.
It's funny how desktop publishing was at first such an amazing thing to happen for graphic design, but will ultimately decimate it as a career choice.
posted by ejs at 1:41 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
It's funny how desktop publishing was at first such an amazing thing to happen for graphic design, but will ultimately decimate it as a career choice.
posted by ejs at 1:41 PM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, well, they've been saying that since Aldus Pagemaker so I'm waiting to see it happen.
posted by infini at 2:08 PM on April 28, 2017
posted by infini at 2:08 PM on April 28, 2017
I hear they pair well with fava beans and a nice chianti. (Also, I've now favorited a font website... I feel dirty.)
posted by Nanukthedog at 2:24 PM on April 28, 2017
posted by Nanukthedog at 2:24 PM on April 28, 2017
I knew what I was getting into, clicking this. So maybe it's silly of me to be annoyed about it, but, pairing fonts is such a small part of successful design but on the other hand I'm a professional designer and I'm completely okay with services like Canva or prebuilt templates or guides like this that are all over Pinterest for bloggers. That's fine, of course everyone should learn about good design as much or as little as they want! But I also don't really care if the average person knows all this stuff — it's not your job! Do your job and I'll do mine, and hopefully more designers will stop being dicks about folks who use Comic Sans because it doesn't make you a better person if you're a designer, it just means you happen to be good at it or at least learned a lot about it.
And obligatory rant, good typography and good design go beyond a good font pairing. It's about knowing about leading and space between hard returns and kerning/tracking and balancing the rag in a paragraph. It's about avoiding the widow or unnecessary hyphenation. It's about using smart quotes and removing extra spaces and choosing well design typefaces that include ligatures. It's about understand contrast and hierarchy and how humans take in information to make something easy to read. Design is not just about how things look, it's about function, like a goddamn resume that tells the hiring manager what they need to know, like your name and phone number and your achievements.
Okay. Admittedly, most of that is covered in the article. This is really just for all the people out there who learn that I'm a designer and decide they have to compete with me, which I don't get — I don't meet people who are like, pediatricians or software engineers or salespeople or whatever and try to convince them I basically can do their job. But people do this to me all the time! It's a hard balance between professional pride about my skills that I've developed over years of education and experience, and also wanting to assure people that I don't think I'm superior because I know a lot of design, because everyone knows a lot about the thing they do for a living and it's NBD!
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 5:38 PM on April 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
And obligatory rant, good typography and good design go beyond a good font pairing. It's about knowing about leading and space between hard returns and kerning/tracking and balancing the rag in a paragraph. It's about avoiding the widow or unnecessary hyphenation. It's about using smart quotes and removing extra spaces and choosing well design typefaces that include ligatures. It's about understand contrast and hierarchy and how humans take in information to make something easy to read. Design is not just about how things look, it's about function, like a goddamn resume that tells the hiring manager what they need to know, like your name and phone number and your achievements.
Okay. Admittedly, most of that is covered in the article. This is really just for all the people out there who learn that I'm a designer and decide they have to compete with me, which I don't get — I don't meet people who are like, pediatricians or software engineers or salespeople or whatever and try to convince them I basically can do their job. But people do this to me all the time! It's a hard balance between professional pride about my skills that I've developed over years of education and experience, and also wanting to assure people that I don't think I'm superior because I know a lot of design, because everyone knows a lot about the thing they do for a living and it's NBD!
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 5:38 PM on April 28, 2017 [8 favorites]
Combining clean, easy to read typefaces that create hierarchy and balance is imperative when you are trying to convey a message.
Agreed. So why were they saying this about Julius Sans One, one of those recent ultra-skinny typefaces that read like 1I11I1llI1I1ll1 to my eyes? The only way to make it less 'easy to read' would be to present it in a trendy grey-on-gray shading scheme. Get off my lawn.
posted by traveler_ at 5:57 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh lord, in addition to being all over the place, noticing the number of typos in my comment above makes me really glad I didn't decide to go on and on about how good copywriting and careful proofing are also skills I have as a Fancyass Designer Lady.
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 6:10 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by the thorn bushes have roses at 6:10 PM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]
I was looking for some good serif + sans combos to copy and left disappointed.
posted by rhizome at 11:09 PM on April 28, 2017
posted by rhizome at 11:09 PM on April 28, 2017
I hadn't heard of Canva, so I clicked through and nosed around the site a little. Is it me, or do all these "corporate resumes" look like restaurant menus?
posted by Hal Mumkin at 5:10 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Hal Mumkin at 5:10 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Design considerations are great, but readability is more important. Give me fonts that visually distinguish numeral 1, capital I, and lower-case l, and I will happily forgive quite a bit of "flawed design."
Although Hal Mumkin is so right about those menus. (I don't like the menus, either, nor the horse they rode in on.)
posted by Weftage at 8:01 AM on April 29, 2017
Although Hal Mumkin is so right about those menus. (I don't like the menus, either, nor the horse they rode in on.)
posted by Weftage at 8:01 AM on April 29, 2017
This has a mixture of good advice (in particular, the “combinations” which are just good use of a single type family), bad advice (combining three different sans-serifs with different classifications, recommending a body font without proper italics), and downright ugly advice (letterspacing lowercase is bad enough, but doing it to a condensed face‽ Just use the regular width!)
I think Jeremiah Shoaf, a.k.a. Typewolf, does a much more thoughtful job of pairing fonts. He earns a living doing this, so there’s a lot that isn’t available for free (I bought his definitive guide to free fonts a couple of years ago, and he is scrupulous about maintaining it so it stays definitive, including sending an updated version every month), but there’s still really good information freely available on his blog.
posted by nicepersonality at 9:19 AM on April 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
I think Jeremiah Shoaf, a.k.a. Typewolf, does a much more thoughtful job of pairing fonts. He earns a living doing this, so there’s a lot that isn’t available for free (I bought his definitive guide to free fonts a couple of years ago, and he is scrupulous about maintaining it so it stays definitive, including sending an updated version every month), but there’s still really good information freely available on his blog.
posted by nicepersonality at 9:19 AM on April 29, 2017 [4 favorites]
I've bookmarked this thread hoping for knowledge. I am a designer, but not a graphic designer, and in my opinion, graphic design is the hardest of all the design disciplines. I can easily imagine myself on a car-design team, but I have no idea how to even begin to design a font or layout a page. Unfortunately, bad design hurts my brain. I can see it is bad but I can't amend it.
Long story short: I like this type of guide because I am sometimes in situations where graphic design is needed but there is no interest in paying for it. Generally, researchers and/or consultants are happy to create business or research presentations in Word or PowerPoint. To me, this is like the screeching of nails on a blackboard. If a guide can improve the results, I'm in. Some universities and companies have templates, which is great, but sometimes you are left with people who want to express their creativity in their slideshow on parking lots.
posted by mumimor at 10:10 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
Long story short: I like this type of guide because I am sometimes in situations where graphic design is needed but there is no interest in paying for it. Generally, researchers and/or consultants are happy to create business or research presentations in Word or PowerPoint. To me, this is like the screeching of nails on a blackboard. If a guide can improve the results, I'm in. Some universities and companies have templates, which is great, but sometimes you are left with people who want to express their creativity in their slideshow on parking lots.
posted by mumimor at 10:10 AM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]
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posted by scratch at 11:31 AM on April 28, 2017