Typophile

Gill Sans with Garamond or Georgia?

giulianovelli

I am designing a website and I would like to use Gill Sans for display titles & short bursts of text.

My idea is to render as png and sifr Gill Sans Extra Bold or Heavy for logo, taglines and main titles and using the default Gill Sans for mac for secondary titles and support text (list of links, navigation, sidebar content).

For windows, where Gill Sans isn't present I will fall back to Trebuchet/Calibri MS(dependending of the os version the user runs).

But I would also like to use a serif for long-length body text (mainly articles's content) at a somewhat bigger size than the average (14/16px).

Do you think is possibile and advisable to couple Gill Sans with a serif like Garamond, Georgia or Cambria? If so, which of these fonts do you think is more suitable to coupling with Gill Sans (mainly with the extra bold/heavy weights)?

My possibile choices are (limited to os default fonts):

Garamond (with Hoefler Text and Palatino as fallbacks), Georgia ( with Palatino or Times/Times New Roman.) or Cambria (fallbacks: Georgia and Times/Times New Roman)

I am not an expert so I am not comfortable in combining fonts and i would really appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance

Riccardo Sartori

A word of advice: Georgia, which was created with screen use in mind will appear a lot larger than most of the alternatives.

Dan Gayle

Gill Sans is, although not by default, still on a vast number of Windows machines. Something like at least 50%, IIRC. I believe it comes with Word?

The Garamond on a Windows box isn't the greatest typeface in the world for screen legibility, and Georgia is used practically everywhere, so if you want to be slightly different, Palatino makes a good choice as a companion.

An added benefit is that both Gill Sans and Palatino follow classical proportions, so you'll have that going for you as well.

But then again, I find Georgia to be beautiful in many sizes because it is so well designed.

giulianovelli

Thanks for your suggestions.

I am using Palatino for body copy with good results (imho).

I will share when finished.

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