19 best fonts in 19 top combinations

Update: February 26, 2019: After nine years of the digital-only edition, the Big Book of Font Combinations is available in glorious, full-sized print editions: paperback and hardcover. Learn more! Update: April 5, 2016: I recently compiled a list of the 19 most popular fonts according to usage by graphic designers from all over the web. I could have had 100, but I got it down to under 50, and from there whittled it down to just the 19 best fonts. Why 19? Because at exactly 20, the “long tail” shot right out and the differences in tallies became negligible. Take a look at those top fonts if you want and come right back because now we are going to have a little typography fun. What we have here is that list of 19 top fonts once again, but this  time combined into pairs to give us 19 best font combinations.

How does combining fonts work?

I simply followed the golden rule of font combinations, which is simply to combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. For excellent font pairings, the farther apart the typeface styles are, as a guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad. Set a line of Times Roman over Garamond and you’ll see what I mean.  I chose the simple model of a bold headline font and normal weight body font. All the font combinations got the same “lorem” text.

How did I choose the combinations?

I tried to mix it up, but had to make some arbitrary decisions. For instance, I could have picked Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, or Minion, etc. (all serif typefaces) to go with Futura (a sans serif typeface). I simply choose to spread them out amongst themselves, keeping the use of repeats down to a minimum.