Conrad. Its just the most awesome typeface ever.

I think it will be Base by Emigre. I like it’s synthetic look.

Susan Kare’s Geneva system font at 9 pt, aliased.

Clean, crisp, compact, readable. This would be for screen use only, of course.

I’d use it for the rest of life, or as long as my eyesight allowed me to.

Comic Sans

Its so versatile.

:p

My girlfriend - also we have genders in Italian, “font” is female, and “character” is male.

All Franklin Gothics!

The Univers family. I don’t think I need to explain this.

Recently I become a huge fan of the Cronos.

I assume you mean one font family, rather than a single weight/style?

I’m cheating a bit because it has so many variations, but Amplitude always looks good, no matter the size or subject matter.

Gotham. It’s so versatile. It can look classic, fun, industrial, sleek depending on how you use it.

I would never be able to settle on one for the rest of my life. That would mean I would not be allowed to design any. Twenty years ago, I would have said Univers. Today, I would say whatever one I am working on at the moment.

ChrisL

that’s like saying what food would you eat for the rest of your life. if i had to choose, i’d say german chocolate cake with coconut frosting.

Paul, but then what about Vanilla Swiss Almond ice cream and baklava with a quad espresso? :-)
So many choices, so little time :-)

ChrisL

exactly. why would you wanna miss out on all those great things?!

I agree, that is why I could not choose one face.

ChrisL

thus i have proven my point.

See my avatar.

Actually Lore’s avatar is letters made from cookies—combining taste-treats and type in one image :-)

ChrisL

too bad my browser isn’t accepting cookies. )^;

Edward Johnston always kept a spare piece of toast in his pocket...

My browser doesn’t accept baklava either :-)

ChrisL

Edward Johnson did not have vending machines or Starbucks on every corner :-)
I am sure his arteries were less clogged though.

ChrisL

“If you had to” thankfully we will never have to make this choice, but it’s fun to think about.

A spare piece of toast in his pocket? That’s very funny.

It would have to be Peter Biľak’s Fedra family in its entirety.

It has everything you could possibly need.

hmm... If it was really down to one font, I’d go with my own hand writing, which while illegible, is expressive and doesn’t lack character.

After 30 minutes thinking about this question I didn’t found the font I would use for the rest of my life. I just know it will be a font with serifes.
Funny question!

Always Erbar Mediaeval. Legible at small sizes, but also nice for display. And it has the most beautiful figures in the world.

One typeface —> Miller Roman
One family of typefaces —> Miller

Addendum: But can I change my mind? :^P

Daily Tiff :-)

ChrisL

German Chocolate Cake indeed! But if I had to choose one food it would not be dessert.

Truly, though, I’d need a font family that has both Sans + Serif so I’d have to go with something like Scala or Fedra or Thesis altho I can’t say any of those is my favorite.

Sans: Nobel (if I could afford it) or Gotham - both have condensed as well as regular. Also love Akzidenz Grotesk.

Serif: Probably something like Adobe Garamond (I know...) because it is so versatile and has the expert set. Gotta be practical. And gotta work with the sans. Adobe Garamond works with almost anything.

I’d hate to lock myself into something too funky.

Of course I could answer for Massimo Vignelli: Bodoni & Helvetica. We haven’t bashed him in at least a week.

If I had to pick (for what reason and why?) I am tempted to choose Alpha Geometrique (all weights), by Clotilde Olyff, whose body of work and exploration into letters and forms I truly admire.

The faces are everything that type “shouldn’t be”.
I would be freed from trying to make words legible and can evoke higher cognitive functions, play with typographic rhythms and aesthetic placement of glyphs.

Could I communicate?
Yes, but very slowly... and either delight or befuddle the reader.

Why should I care.
By selecting only one family of type, I’ve made a commitment to explore possibilities that are important only to me. With such harsh restrictions on using a font, maybe I’ll even see more letter shapes around me (as does Clotilde in sand pebbles below) and start setting words using items found in the environment.

Serif:

I desperately want to say Dolly by Underware, or Absara by Xavier Dupre.
But I’ll go with Hoefler Text.

Sans:

My heart says Lisboa by Fountain, and Aperto (PsyOps, I think) which is an Optima with a bit more flair. Absara Sans would be an obvious choice for Absara, so that particular gem occupies a special corner of my heart. But my head says Helvetica Neue and Frutiger. Oh well.

So there you have it.

Neue Helvetica! This font is near to perfection as any font can get. Its like perfect for- everything!

Mikey

Only one!? If I’m only allowed to use one, I may as well indulge myself. I can’t get enough of Eric Olson’s Maple. :^)

But if you ask me next week or tomorrow, this answer is bound to be different.

Ludicrous question, befitting answer:

A multiple master that allows the addition of serifs, changing weights, and narrow through extended.

It must be beautiful, almost hypnotic in all forms.

Now, if you could only have one CD...? - just kidding.
; )

In actuality, since I am a designer in an in-house shop, I actually do have only one font for 90% of what I do. That is Helvetica, though we are switching to Meta Design’s Transit.

A little less facetiously than my own “Handwriting” ‡¬), I am a big fan of older type faces. While more recent designs are more appropriate for today’s technology, and in many instances are more readable and versatile, I like the look of a classic type with idiosyncratic characters, non lining numerals and a little bit of ink squishing out around the edges. Maybe a Bodini - but hand tooled, and where the ’s’s look like ’f’s. If I’m living in a world with but one typographic note, I’ll choose a warm, sensual and aesthetically pleasing one over an efficient, practical, higly readable font.

As a signage designer, whose been around for a long time, I’m also fond of the look of a hand drawn, cut or painted letter in signage and display type. I may be a tad anachronistic, but I like to see the hand of the person who made it evident in the execution. These days when it is so easy to reproduce perefectly formed letters, it is often a relief to see hand drawn lettering, even if slighlty amaturish.

I suppose the question truly makes sense if we talk about a typeface designed for extensive textsetting.

Once I would have chosen some Garamond or Jannon, then some good Baskerville. Right now, I consider Quadraat by Fred Smeijers an amazing synthesis, doing better what many typefaces have done in the past.

If you allow me an accompanying sans, it would just be an improved version of the Univers family.

“It would have to be Peter Biľak’s Fedra family in its entirety.
It has everything you could possibly need.”

I agree, this would be my pick aswell.

It had better be something I would want to read for the rest of my life. Probably something Dutch mannerist. Perhaps Renard if I didn’t want to get bored: I could spend the rest of my life alternating days when I like and dislike the italic.

There’s always the classics from which once can choose fonts that more or less stand as the basis from which other, newer designs have sprung. The Great Serifs come to mind - those that have survived the transition to digital form (some have not, like Electra and Bembo, but Bembo Book offers hope):

Jenson
Elzevir
Dante
Fleischmann
Miller
Bulmer
Sabon
Albertina
Caslon
Bell
Fournier

i’d rather kill myself than have to pick just one to use for the rest of my life.

Gill Sans

Frutiger would be my choice even though I have to sacrifice the beauty of Trajan!! Oh what a compelling decision to make.

—- pinky kinky winky —-

i’d rather kill myself than have to pick just one to use for the rest of my life.

No need to be so wishy-washy.
; )

I love these questions. I recently spent too much time deciding who I’d choose if I could only take the movies of one actor away to my desert island. (Decided Harrison Ford in the end. Sure, he’s made a truck load of rubbish, but at least I get the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies). :-)

But back to topic: even though I’m a serif man, if I could only have one it’d have to be Univers. I love it for sentimental reasons as well as aesthetic ones. It feels so familiar and -oddly enough - like my favourite overcoat that I love getting out of the cupboard each year when Winter rolls back around.

I’d rather pick just one – PMN Caecilia – to use for the rest of my life than kill myself.

It seems like a perfect compromise.

ƒ

thats tough.

but anyway, dolly, man’s best friend.

well since I have been working with type so long I never use type.

It’s like when I was playing baseball in College I never ever watched Major League Baseball for about 6 years until I stopped playing at that level.

So I use Georgia for about everything for myself. But the two websites I made recently the client said Avant Garde!! and Kunstler Scirpt

but I’d say Courier for life.

Give me any script and I’ll be fine for a couple of days. The fluffier the better. Then I’ll probably start crying and stop eating and sleeping and I’ll be shaking, sweating and feeling cold. At the end I will be screaming and begging for a Frutiger or a Gill Sans and do anything you want for any sans serif.
A dramatic question demands a dramatic answer...

Mind you, if Gentium had small caps/osf and a sans version, and maybe a few interesting ligatures (not that it really needs any), I’d probably pick that. Gentium has impressed the hell out of me recently. It’s also free.

“A dramatic question demands a dramatic answer…”

To be or not to be, what font is the question. Whether tis nobl’r in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous limitation to but one font...

:-)

ChrisL

I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a garalde from a transitional.

I tend to go with claes on this one. Without typography, life would really have no meaning.