(c) April Arcus 2015
Many important sans serifs can be organized on a single axis from geometric to humanist.
Futura, Neutraface, Century Gothic, Avant Garde Gothic. These faces are characterized by relentlessly even stroke weight with curves approaching circular arc segments. Futura was heavily used by the Apollo program and other scientific materials from the 1960s, Stanley Kubrik's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Wes Anderson. Avant Garde is the brand font of Ardent Heavy Industries. Abandoning all semblance of the handwritten origin of lettering, these typefaces, with their repetitive uniform shapes, are deliberately stylish and illegible. Reserve for use in headings and display type only; they are a dyslexic's worst nightmare in body sizes. Futura is particularly overused, favor the similar but fresher Neutraface 2 when available. See also Architype Renner for an interesting evolutionary dead-end in this genre.
Gotham, Proxima Nova, Avenir, Akzidenz-Grotesk, Museo Sans. This genre originated in hand-painted signage of turn-of-the-century east coast America, which was codified in Switzerland as Akzidenz-Grotesk (a.k.a. "Standard") in 1906. Gotham was cut by Tobias Frere-Jones for G.Q. magazine and was the typographical centerpiece of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Adrian Frutiger's Avenir is heavily associated with San Francisco startups and expensive New American cuisine. Proxima Nova is frequently used as a stand-in for the ridiculously expensive Gotham on web publications such as Boing Boing. Museo Sans is a freely available alternative of acceptable quality.
Helvetica, Univers, Folio, Arial. These faces emerged in 1950s Switzerland as a more humanized, legible adaptation of the Akzidenz-Grotesk family. They are the most geometric faces suitable for body copy, but still generally look best at large point sizes and light weights. Helvetica is famously ubiquitous, but resist the urge to imitate Apple's extensive use of it: with highly repetitive verticals, symmetrical letterforms, tight default tracking, and an almost- closed lowercase 'e', Helvetica Neue is the least legible system font in general use. Linotype Helvetica and Helvetica Neue both come pre-installed on Mac OS, but the the best digital version currently available is Font Bureau's Neue Haas Grotesk.
Frutiger's Univers Oblique was used on Apple's PowerBook keyboards in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the upright can be found on BART's printed materials.
Arial originated a reworking of Monotype Grotesque, an English-looking humanist font, into the metrical specifications of Helvetica so that it could be used as a drop-in substitute on off-brand laser printers in the late 80s. Its pixel font version was adopted by Microsoft as its system font in Windows 3.1 and on the screen at tiny point sizes without antialiasing, is a loving homage to Helvetica. At higher point sizes and in print its strange outlines and catty-wumpus stroke terminals become a distracting typographic shibboleth.
Humanist: Adrian Frutiger's eponymous masterpiece (1975), and its descendents Myriad (Carol Twombly, 1992), Tahoma and Verdana (Matthew Carter, 1994/1996), and (less directly) Corbel. Myriad is the typeface on the outside of your iPhone or MacBook, and also the brand font of Adobe, who commissioned and distribute it. Tahoma and Verdana are screen-optimized TrueType fonts released gratis by Microsoft in the 1990s, and formed the lingua franca of sans-serif type on the web during the Internet Explorer era. Like Arial, these last two look good on the screen and bad in print. In particular, their bold weights are overbold, a result of the constraint that their strokes had to render to precisely one pixel thick or two pixels thick in the era before anti-aliasing. When IKEA switched from Futura to Verdana as its corporate font in 2009, the ensuing tut-tutting from the typographic community achieved mainstream press attention.
These fonts are prosaic and very good for body copy.
Lucida (Bigelow & Holmes, 1985), Thesis (Luc(as) de Groot, 1994-1999), PT Sans (Paratype, 2009), Lato (Łukasz Dziedzic, 2010). Specifically created to fill the need for beautiful and legible sans type faces in digital applications, and optimized for legibility with organic contours and very large x-heights. Lucida and Thesis are mega-families, available with matching serif, chancery, and monospace typefaces. Lucida is distinguished by its obsessively completist unicode repertoire and was used by Apple as the Mac OS X system font until 2014. Thesis, cut by Luc(as) de Groot in the late 90s, forms the basis of Microsoft's "Consolas" monospace programming font. Lato and PT Sans are two faces in this genre available freely from Google Fonts, and have a fresher feel than Lucida.
These faces look best with anti-aliasing in the style of OS X, iOS and Android, and underperform on Windows XP and earlier.
- Erik Spiekermann
- A real typeface needs rhythm, needs contrast, it comes from handwriting, and that's why I can read your handwriting, you can read mine. And I'm sure our handwriting is miles away from Helvetica or anything that would be considered legible, but we can read it, because there's a rhythm to it, there's a contrast to it. Helvetica hasn't got any of that.
- Gary Hustwit
- Why, fifty years later, is it still so popular?
- Erik Spiekermann
- [sighs] Why is... bad taste ubiquitous?
Spiekermann's FF Meta is a category-defining riposte to everything wrong with Helvetica. Unabashedly calligraphic for a sans, these iconoclastic traits have been reigned in its Microsoft-commissioned knock-off "Trebuchet MS", and in "Fira Sans", an open-source, screen-optimized edition commissioned from Spiekermann by Mozilla.
These are my favorite faces for body copy on the screen.
The beauty of Gill Sans stands in juxtaposition with the depravity of its creator, English sculptor, printmaker, and typecutter Eric Gill. Beautiful, idiosyncratic, flexible in weight, dramatic in form. Inspired by and evocative of British signage of the 1940s ("Keep Calm and Carry On"). Recent faces operating in this modus include Candara (Gary Munch for Microsoft, 2007), Calluna Sans (exljbris/Jos Buivenga, 2010), and Ideal Sans (Jonathan Hoefler, 2011). These can work in body copy in print or on high-resolution digital devices.
DIN 1451 is a timeless masterpiece, instantly evoking precision German engineering. If Futura and Gill Sans define two endpoints on a geometric–humanist continuum, DIN 1451 defines the rectilinear endpoint of a second, orthogonal, circular-rectangular axis. See also Eurostile.
E-13B is the "computer font" on the bottom row of your bank checks. See also OCR-A.
Highway Gothic and its successor Clearview, ubiquitous American road signage typefaces.
Impact is the "I can has cheezburger" font, and should not be far from the reach of any internet quipster.
Optima, by Herman Zapf, is a "semi serif", most closely associated with Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial Wall. Yahoo! uses it as their corporate identity face. Why would you do that, Yahoo!?
Comic Sans is overused and deservedly mocked, but nobody can deny the appeal that its friendly character has had in the scientific community as presentations have moved from the tactile reality of chalk talks to sterile powerpoint slide decks. It achieved its apotheosis in 2012 when CERN used it to announce the Higgs Boson. With connotations of children's lemonade stands, Doge memes, and high-energy physics all at once, the evocative power of Comic Sans can be decried but not denied.
Notably, one thing Comic Sans is NOT is a very good comic-style typeface. For one thing, it is usually used in a mixed-case style, whereas the vernacular of comic books is block-printed uppercase letters. These ballpoint styles are in a tradition of handwriting that ultimately directly inspired the humanist genre, and their two greatest exponents are Tom Orzechowski, known for an extended run on "The Uncanny X-Men" in the 1980s, and Todd Klein, who brought his expressive lettering to "The Sandman" in the '90s. Nowadays superhero comics are almost all computer-lettered, but these two artists set a high-water mark in the last years of their craft.
Also noteworthy: the baroque geometric sound effects of Walter Simonson from his '80s run on "The Mighty Thor"
Pixel Fonts: A genre that emerged with the computer terminals of the late 70s and developed to flatter their low-resolution cathode ray tube display technology. Most recognizable among these may be IBM's Code Page 437, as rendered by their CGA Adapter.
This sub-genre entered its Rococo phase with the work of Susan Kare, graphic designer of the original Macintosh, for which she developed:
Monaco 9, the prettiest monospaced pixel font ever made, beloved by Mac programmers until the screens of the 110+ dpi era rendered its obsessively pixel-precise contours illegibly tiny.
Geneva, a bitmap homage to Helvetica.
Chicago, a bold elephantine constructivist face and the system font of the Mac from 1984 to 1998, and the iPod from 2001 to 2004.
Although later converted to TrueType outlines by Bigelow & Holmes in homage to Kare's originals, I consider these adaptations to be failures, neither capturing the quirky character of the pixely originals, nor standing up particularly well against purpose-built outline fonts. Stick to the pixely originals.
Another bitmap font of note is Espy Sans, a lovely humanist face used on the Apple Newton and iPod Mini.
A more recent and important addition to this genre is Jason Kottke's Silkscreen, a minimalist, five-pixel high all-caps face.