Recommend Me Three Typeface Families

Claes Källarsson24 March 2006 · 07:43

The teachers at my school have asked us students to recommend three typefaces (families), as they are looking to expand their (meager) library on the school’s computers.. and you all here seem to be very handy in recommending fonts when someone is looking for a good alternative to this and that font, so I’d just love for you all to inspire me to find three nice families to recommend.

I was thinking I’d recommend a serif text font, a sans serif and a more fanciful display font (not necessarily House Industries fanciful, but more exotic and unique). Preferrably all available in Opentype formats.

Oh, and they have many of the standard classics (Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Bookman, Franklin Gothic, Futura, Palatino, Gill Sans, Helvetica, etc.) so I was thinking I’d recommend some more new and not quite as common fonts. They should be fairly broad in usability though since they’d be used for students on all kinds of projects.

Thank you in advance!

Paul Cutler24 March 2006 · 07:49

Do they have money?

(serif text) HTF - Mercury
(sans serif) HTF - Gotham
(display) Storm - Farao

Pretty hard to do just three…
peace

Tiffany Wardle24 March 2006 · 07:54

Claes,

Instead of looking for only 3 families, you should look for foundries who have educational discounts. I would email the foundries who have the typefaces you/they would most like to license and ask if they have any discounts for education. You should also consider CD collections insead of just families. For instance, Storm Type Foundry has the several different collections which has a bevy of differenty typefaces.

Claes Källarsson24 March 2006 · 08:03

Do they have money?

given their currently slim library, i highly doubt it. hopefully they can at least get some new faces, though, even if it’ll end up being smaller families.

anyway, all those three you recommended are definitely interesting. i really like the Gotham typeface, so thanks for the reply!

Paul Cutler24 March 2006 · 08:09

Beware - HTF fonts are NOT cheap!

peace

Claes Källarsson24 March 2006 · 08:11

Claes,

that’s funny, because i just earlier thought about whether foundries offer educational discounts or not. you’d think many do, but i have no idea since i’ve never been in the position of buying fonts that way. they should definitely see if they can find discounts, but maybe they already do that. i’ll certainly mention it to them, so thanks for the tip.

i’ll do check for collections too, that might be more ideal for them.. more fonts for less money. even if those fonts might not have the most amount of styles, it’s not really like they need to buy a family that has 50 different styles.

Tiffany Wardle24 March 2006 · 08:20

This would be a good wiki entry.

I do know that P22 has something set up for education. I think Adobe does. I’d be willing to bet Nick Shinn take this into consideration.

Do email the foundries and ask.

Claes Källarsson24 March 2006 · 09:34

and before anyone else points it out, i did notice this thread just now, although i do still want everyone’s recommendations for those three fonts/families. it’s always great to find out about fonts you hadn’t encountered before.. so keep ’em coming, please!

George Horton24 March 2006 · 09:47

If money’s short, look at IM Fell: free Baroque text and display fonts, at least one of which (Van Dijck’s Fell English roman) shows off rather more intelligent text-type design than is to be found in many a new creation - look at the clever variation in vertical alignment, by which ascenders and descenders are emphasized.