BonFX

Typography & Graphic Design Blog

The BonFX Letter

One good pairing.
Every Tuesday.

2-minute read · free

This week — no. 14

Quiet authority

Merriweather sets the tone in one line. Lato stays out of the way and lets it.

MERRIWEATHER 700  +  LATO 400

A font specimen, a pairing that works, and one line on why it works. That is the whole email.

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About BonFX

A print shop with an Albion hand press and cases of metal type

I am Douglas Bonneville. I have been a graphic designer since 1992, and I have been writing about type on this site since 2009.

BonFX is two things right now: a blog about typography and design, and the books that came out of it.

The blog

Most of what I publish is font pairing. The library has more than eighty guides, one per typeface, and every pairing in them is rendered from the real font files: a headline-and-body layout, an alternate layout, and the full character sets of both fonts. They all roll up into one page, Font Combinations: The Complete Guide to Font Pairings, which is the best place to start. Older pieces cover the 17 types of fonts, the 100 best fonts, 29 principles for combining type, and 23 really bad font choices.

The books

The Big Book of Font Combinations (2010, print edition 2019) shows 350 pairings of the classic fonts, each one in a real layout. The Preposterously Huge Book of Google Font Combinations (2020) does the same for more than 600 free Google Fonts. UX for Cats explains 50 essential UX terms, each one illustrated, simply enough that your cat gets it. All three are on Amazon; the font books are also PDFs on Gumroad.

The letter

Once a week I send one good pairing and one line on why it works. It is free, it takes two minutes to read, and the signup is in the sidebar of every page.

Me

I work from Exeter, Rhode Island. Besides design I write software, and most of what you see here now comes out of an AI pipeline I built for the site. It renders every pairing from the real font files, checks each one against published sources, and builds the article. An agentic workflow runs the rest: it rebuilds the site’s internal links every time something new goes up, tests every page, and flags what needs a human. I still make the design decisions. The system does the production.

Questions about the books or the site: contact page.

Banner photo: Printing press (Albion), by Rodw, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0; converted to black and white with an orange overlay.

About BonFX

Douglas Bonneville has been a graphic designer since 1992 and has written about type here since 2009. BonFX is a blog about typography and design, and the books that came out of it.

More about BonFX →

Start Here

Contact

Questions about the books or the site? Contact us.

Follow @dbonneville on X.

The BonFX Letter: one good pairing every Tuesday, free. The signup is in the sidebar of every page.