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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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How to try fonts online
Many people don’t know how great the font tryout tools are over at MyFonts.com. Here is a quick tutorial to show you just how easy it is to take a typeface or font for a spin, changing it’s size, kerning, and even sampling its extras like ligatures and fractions. It takes about 1 minute to drill down to exactly what you are looking for and start experimenting.
You’ll see the logo on the left. You are in the right place!
Step 2: Start searching for your favorite font
Look on the far right for the search box and start typing.
Step 3: Get some search help
MyFonts.com will assist you in finding what you are looking for.
Step 4: Review your search criteria in the results
Notice how you could have searched for a string, like “neue” or “bold” or “old style” or even “script” and MyFonts.com would have given results based on those partials searches. Try it out to narrow your results if need be.
Step 5: Review the results for the right typeface or font
In this case, since we searched for Helvetica Neue, we got a link to the entire typeface, not just a font within it.
Step 6: Review the different fonts in the typeface
Step 7: Change the default text
Type in something different and change the font size. If you blow up the text to the max size, there is a brief lag while the display redraws the font at the new size. Fonts done really big in this tool look fantastic.
Step 8: Reset the values
If you play around and get the text all screwy and font size all out of whack, just click here to reset everything. The baseline texts are pangrams, which give you a nice random selection of letters other than “a quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog”.
Step 9: Play with ligatures, fractions, and more
Step 10: View a font up close
You can get a very, very detailed full page sample sheet of each font in a typeface family. It goes from 144pt all the way down to 10pt.
Step 11: Buy a font or typeface!
If you see what you like, you are ready to make a purchase! MyFonts.com makes sure it doesn’t get much easier than that.
So, visit MyFonts.com and poke around and have fun.
Douglas has been a graphic designer since 1992, in addition to software developer and author. He is a member of Smashing Magazine's "Panel of Experts" and has contributed to over 100 articles. He is the author of "The Big Book of Font Combinations", loves cats, and plays guitar.
Thanks for posting this, I have been looking for a site like this! Perfect! I am working with itchair.com right now to perfect my website, and they are doing such an amazing job! We were just trying to find the fonts that were the best fit!
You can just type your desired words or texts online in http://fontviewer.paronsoft.net (“Font View List” tab) to preview them using all the fonts currently installed on your PC at once. You don’t need to install any software.
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.
Thanks for posting this, I have been looking for a site like this! Perfect! I am working with itchair.com right now to perfect my website, and they are doing such an amazing job! We were just trying to find the fonts that were the best fit!
@ Kelly: Glad you stopped by and glad this was of some use to you!
thanks so much, this is a great find, i really needed this.
You can just type your desired words or texts online in http://fontviewer.paronsoft.net (“Font View List” tab) to preview them using all the fonts currently installed on your PC at once. You don’t need to install any software.