By Douglas Bonneville on February 4, 2011
An Inspiring Collection of Fonts
FontShop sold a typeface collection called “100 Best Fonts” for a limited time in Germany a little while back. The website for this special promotion generously listed the names of all 100 best typefaces for graphic design with background information in German. When the typeface collection was no longer available, the promotional site itself retained a life of its own, serving as a go-to reference for graphic designers looking for inspiration. The PDF on the promotional website is a beautiful piece of design work, a nice visual resource, and just plain fun to look at even if you don’t read German. (NOTE: You can click the typeface names for more info)
How could this great list be improved? I was interested into what categories and classifications these classic fonts were placed, what foundries they were from, and what interesting insights might avail themselves if I could see all the data in one place. I also wanted one place to see examples of all these great typefaces, so I put those together too.
Continue reading “The 100 Best Fonts (in a Huge Sortable Table)”
Posted in Typography |
By Douglas Bonneville on February 1, 2011
What fonts go with Gill Sans and match up nicely? The truth is that there are probably thousands of fonts that would pair with Gill Sans just fine. The trouble is finding them and making something work really well. To find something that works and still have time left for designing, you are going to have to limit your choices. But to what?
Continue reading “Fonts that work with Gill Sans”
Posted in Font Combinations, Typography |
By Douglas Bonneville on February 1, 2011
So I’m working on this big new post (check back soon) and I notice two curly quotes that for some reason struck me like they looked like that old-time barbershop down-the-middle hairstyle from the turn of the 20th century. I had typed the characters in the order they appeared on the keyboard (I had been typing just the keys with symbols) I happened to be looking at Souvenir, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1903. So then I thought, “What are the chances that Benton has this exact hairdo?” Pretty high it turns out. The keystrokes looked like the beginning of a typographic portrait.
Continue reading “Typographic Portrait: Morris Fuller Benton typeset in Souvenir”
Posted in Typography |
By Douglas Bonneville on January 22, 2011
Smashing Magazine’s eBook #6: Typography has just been released. I contributed an article, “Best Practices of Combining Typefaces“. Please drop by the Smashing Magazine store and pick up a copy for your iPad, iPhone, or your favorite eBook reader.
Continue reading “Smashing eBook #6: Typography”
Posted in Font Combinations, Typography |
By Douglas Bonneville on December 19, 2010
Once again, just a little horn-tooting: we crossed 200,000 visits last week. When we crossed 100,000 back in May 2010, I mentioned that I thought our tally of visitor totals felt significant for some reason. For that same unknown reason, 200,000 seems important too. Unique page views crossed 340,000. We started in September 2009, and in general get 700-1000 unique visitors a day, but have the odd day of 3000-7000 hits if we post something that gets re-tweeted like mad. That’s happened a dozen times or so.
Continue reading “Graphic design blog hits 200,000 visitors”
Posted in Graphic Design |
By Douglas Bonneville on November 7, 2010
I had a few requests for the PSD from which all the graphics were created for the article “Best Practices of Combining Typefaces“. Here it is for anyone interested in how the graphics were made, whether you liked the psuedo-CSS3 embossing or my choice of colors or not 
.
Continue reading “Free PSD from Smashing Magazine article “Combining Typefaces””
Posted in Font Combinations, Typography |
