Typophile

"12 most readable text fonts"

nina

Type choice advice by people who boldly state that "nowadays, everyone is a typographer", even "everyone is a font designer" and, of course, also a "foundry":
I just got my hands on the magazine of Pro Litteris, the Swiss copyright society for literature. For some reason, they're now doing a series on, you guessed it, fonts. This is the first feature: "The 12 most readable fonts."


My favorite comment on that spread: "If you don't feel like designing, or don't have any talent, use Courier. No Design at its best!"

Stephen Coles

Boo on Syntax and Courier. The rest make sense.

William Berkson

This is misconceived. I wouldn't want to read a novel set in Verdana, or screen text in Minion, but visa versa would be fine. Lexicon is heavy enough for newspaper printing, but I doubt that Scala is, etc. etc.

nina

Yeah; I suspect this is supposed to be a "beginners' collection" so they tried to feature in a reasonable portion of the fonts that anyone would find on their computer anyway. Courier really baffled me too, though ("A design masterpiece from the typewriter era"!).

William, there are some very short (1 to 3 short lines) comments on the individual fonts, and they actually say to handle Verdana with care in print. The rest of the comments seems rather… unuseful ("Veto comes very close in approximating the invisible skeleton of letterforms" – what's that supposed to mean, especially to laymen?).

I'll be curious to see how this progresses. Next issue will have the "12 most decorative fonts" (Curlz anyone?) and after that, it's going to be the "12 most visionary fonts" (that's going to be interesting).

Hrant H Papazian

Two big fat thumbs down.

Invisible skeleton? Don't marry one.

hhp

Chris Lozos

"Top 10 most overused magazine headlines"...

ChrisL

Peter Fraterdeus

I'd be more interested in the 10 most drinkable wines ;-)

PF

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