Typophile

Myriad Companion->Updated

Evan Brogan0 votes

I am looking for some feedback on a companion font.

I'm going to be designing a "brochure" of sorts for my company. It'll be somewhere in the area of 9"x11"--so more like a magazine format, but it will basically explain everything it is that my company does.

We're one of the leading builders in the nation of residential modular homes. These are really good quality homes. We offer just about every type of house you could imagine, from basic ones that are pretty cheap, to traditional homes with really nice interior styling, to urban-chic modern homes, and we can add the latest green features to any of these homes. Giving the customer anything they want means it's a little hard to position our style--but we do want to come across as smart and up-to-date. Our corporate font is Myriad--not anything I chose but I can't really change it.

Here's a few things I'm also thinking about:
1) At first, I thought of combining our corporate face, Myriad, with Diverda Serif for the long copy that will be in this brochure/magazine. But I'm also considering PMN Caecilia. I like how some of the characters in Diverda matched with those of Myriad, yet, at text size, the large X-height of Caecilia seemed more inviting. The latter was created 14 years earlier than the former. I want to use a text face that is modern and friendly, and geometric like Myriad. All these faces are based on Roman proportions. I admit 14 years, typographically speaking, isn't much difference. I thought the slab-serif was a nice touch for a company that builds modularly (each piece of a house is basically a slab, although we end up combining them in beautiful ways). I'm leaning towards Caecilia--but I wondered what others thought about their companionship.

Here are type specimens: (sorry the PDFs were too large)

REALLY TYPOPHILES?

6 days and no answers?

All those people posting font pairing questions without even a semblance of what the job description is or how it will be used, all those times people ask "what looks GOOD with what?" "What's the perfect font for that?"

So here I present relevant information for my choices. And although I'm 90% sure Caecilia will be the right thing to do--a budding typographer could use some reassurance or critique on his methods & choices.

Reassurance comes after doing... :-)

The thing with design problems is that there never really is a "right" answer - just a range of possibilities. It's the nature of design problems. So enjoy the journey and pick something that will solve the problem at hand, knowing that there might be other solutions that could work just as well (and sometimes better) depending on the context...

But I think Caecilia will work just fine.

FWIW — I LOVE Caecilia. So...

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

I couldn't agree more about there being no right solution. We're trained to have multiple solutions. Though, sometimes, some things seem more or less correct--in the subjective, personal sense where one says to oneself, "Yes! THIS is perfect. This is the right one."

This is a case where on opposite days I think one is better than another. Then I revert my opinion. Repeat. At the very least, hopefully they could both work, and I've given the option that if Caecilia is rejected on grounds that it's a little quirky--I've got a backup in the other direction.

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