My wife Caroline, a textile designer (wovens, mostly upholstery), wants a sans for use herself in correspondence, invoices and so on, and that she can use for printed material. It needs therefore to work on ordinary laser-printed output, as well as properly set and printed. She is insistent it be sans. She is quite interested in the idea of having one face for headings, titles etc, and another for the text ... in which case I suspect we'd go for a geometric/distinctive titling face and a more humanist and blander text face.
I find the choice bewildering. Of the fonts you see around a lot she likes both Gill and Futura, but she sensibly wants something different. She likes OS figures. She likes Futura for its Bauhaus connections (a lot of her textile work is Bauhaus inspired) more than for what it looks like, I think. She tends to shrink away from anything quirky -- she reckons, probably rightly, that she needs something pretty plain. (She finds Lux and Giacomo, for instance, which I like a lot, too odd in parts.)
The current menu is: FF Kievit, TheSans, Syntax, Bliss, Parisine. I feel like a kid in a candy store, and simply cannot commit: but I can't afford to buy them all to try them out.
Any views, on these or others? We'd need only two weights, I think.
PS: from a personal point of view, since she is an American living in London, anything American (a fortiori anything RISD) would give her secret pleasure. But that's really a side issue: what she really wants is the best type for the job.
