Which Typeface Is Used By Parenting Magazine?

I think the point here isn’t so much “NEVER use any fonts but these 6” but more an encouragement to designers who may be creatively paralyzed by the thousands of choices out there, as if to say “with a little discipline, look at the amazing variety of looks that can be achieved with only these 6 great faces!” Limited choices can be an incredible accelerant of creativity.

Just some clarification for those newbie designers perusal: 1) Vignelli’s first name is pronounced MAHsimmo, not muhSEEmo; 2) Giambattista Bodoni was Italian, not French (although he was certainly inspired by French typography); 3) at 3:41, you’re moving into sans serif fonts from serif fonts, not the other way around as stated.

This is exactly what I always have believed in. There’s nothing better than classic and timless fonts. Sometimes it might also be a good idea though to add an additional modern font in a smaller size as a contrast. This is why the designs of the most famous fragrance boxes look stunning and inspiring.

I took a graphics course as part of my journalism minor back in ‘72. I enjoyed it so much I took the second level course as an elective. By the end I could find my way around a California job case quite well. Hand setting type was tedious but fun. Our instructor even fired up an already ancient Linotype and let us try it. ETAOIN SHRDLU forever!

Im still studying and learning, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :p I absolutely love the ideal, not that there are a nr of fonts that should remain after all others are trashed, but that there are baselines in styling and function that could very much be these fonts. HOWEVER… and this is me personaly but im sure alot of people relate, I dont just look at fonts as funtional and aestetic, I look at fonts as sensory and emotional representations of language (im neurodivergent and am obsessed with anything that has a sensorial impact so i might be biased) and there are few things that make me more excited than a font (and a layout) that creates a feeling in me. With this ideal the potential for fonts that are almost outrageously diferent and exciting can be limited. All that being said, before you break the “rules” you must learn them, and thats why i feel like this concept is so important, so even tho i dont agree with this fully, i appreciate it and can learn from it. Thank you for putting helpfull info out there in an interesting fashion.

I found this an interesting and useful article. The six or eight basic fonts I agree with as a starting point but not to trash the rest. For example, I noticed no Script Typefaces were mentioned that are meant to simulate handwriting. Also, an array of other fonts need to be considered such as Univers, Gill Sans, Commercial Script, Formal Script, Bodini, Clarendon, Plantin, Cooper Black, not to mention fonts that are condensed, extended and wide. All fonts need to be well designed by professional designers with love and understanding of typography and ultimately need to look at a typeface and what projects they are best suited for and visa versa. Typography is a huge and fascinating topic so choose the right typeface for the right project to communicate the best message.

Good Morning Flux In reference with your other article “How to Choose the Right Font” and this one I found your content simplified and structured for a newbie to do my own Logo without pennies just to get started. You do have an excellence in introducing a newbie into your subject expertise with ease to learn and take action. All the Best with you

Don’t listen to this guy please, these are many great new independent type foundries that offer great fonts. Like Dinamo, Grilli, Optimo, OPS Type, OrType, Soft Machine, Bureau Brut, Approx, Klim, Lineto and many more. They offer high quality and distinct typefaces. Do NOT use Bodoni, Century or Futura ever and don’t limit yourself when you’re starting out. If you want to stick to a small library use these instead; Neue Haas Grotesk / Univers / Bradford / Heldane / Portrait / Founders / Unica /

Oh. When you said garamond was a “medieval” style… 😱 Type, in a designer or printing sense, was born with guttenberg, in the middle of renaissance, with blackletter type. In middle ages there was a all other world with handwritten letters (like carolingean). The other issues, like bodoni and futura, were already mentioned in the comments. Actually is not easy to find a good book on typography history but Meggs History of Design is very helpful.

So I guess English is only language that you’d ever need in the field of design? Because some of these fonts sure as hell don’t even cover other versions of the Latin alphabet (let alone other writing systems). Helvetica doesn’t support my native language Vietnamese, which uses a modified version of Latin.

Ran, I meant to comment on this so long ago, and I let it slip by. I know that a lot of successful designers will jump on this bandwagon about fonts, and I feel like it is just not accurate. I 100% believe that when you are developing and learning, yes, stick to a couple of fonts to really have a solid base to build on., we know that certain fonts for body copy just work. Helvetica Now, DIN, Garamond. All good. With the state of design today, companies trying to do everything cheaper and faster, wanting to use templates for everything. So much is simply being homogenized into nothing. Same sites, different pictures. You look at some companies, they just float in a sea of mediocrity at best. So, locking ourselves into any “all you need” anything is adding to that homogenizing of everything. What a larger set of fonts allows is PERSONALITY. Nothing takes away from good education and understanding of typography at all. You don’t use every font in your library on every project, but we as designers have a job to do. Solve problems. How we solve problems is what we bring to the table, and part of that I feel, is with communication and personality for the brand. Every brand should have personality. What is their “secret sauce”, what sets them apart from every other brand out there? That is what we as designers use our skills to do. Craft and create that sauce for the client. We want our clients to stand out, succeed, and flourish in their sector. They do well, we do well. Good work leads to more good work.

I agree with the gist of the argument – the proliferation of free fonts on the Tubes has created an army of amateurs overloading on fonts. Using a dozen different typefaces in a single document is visual pollution. You should always strive to establish a single font theme, deviating only sparingly and with good reason. But to argue that we only need these six fonts for everything seems a bit … constrictive.

You only need one typeface. The right one for the task. Massimo Vignelli was a great designer. One of many. Remember, even the great ones can sometimes be wrong. A comic book with Helvetica, how fun to read? A kindergarten with a wordmark or logo in Helvetica? I won’t be sending my kids. Also using the same typeface to often is like eating the same meal over and over again, you get sick of it. I love Helvetica but I use most often other typefaces.

Great idea to show the actual fonts only for a few seconds – in a article about those fonts! This way they stay “fresh” while simultaneously offering more screentime for your solid scholarly profile & hand gestures. Extra points for “Yo! I don’t know why I’m showing you something, I just typed something and this came up! Whatevs!” Anywhow! Thanks for taking the time from your busy shedule as a pro to skool us. Keep on influencing hard, bro!

Obviously you can whatever fonts you want. Down sizing the fonts you use only to 6 can be a good for creativity and is very valid way to approach your art. But I’ve never quite liked the thought that there are too many fonts or that people should stop making new fonts or that the new fonts are trash, because there are many modern type designers that that are passionate about type and put a lot of care and love into their work (off the top of my head Lauri Toikka would be a good example). Of coure some of their fonts are expencive. Maybe the one bad thing about modern typeculture is that there are many pirated fonts that wont support the artists that actually made them.

Interesting: I was trying to re-create the book design of a particular 1908 novel for a pastiche I was writing, and Century Expanded was the closest digital typeface that I—a non-specialist—could find. It is not quite identical to the original book, especially the style of the question mark, but pretty close. I do suspect that the original book used metal-type Century Expanded. The typeface has a nice readable look, and I’ve come to like it quite a bit, so I was pleased to hear it mentioned here. Note that it is not identical to its successor, the better-known Century Schoolbook, which came around a decade or two later.

There are times and places tor ALL fonts, even the dreaded Comic Sans 😀Fonts are not only used to make text readable, but to create a mood. Sometimes that mood requires an odd font. The 6 fonts here are good for large locks of text, or if you’re at a complete loss on what font to use, or if you are providing some choices to a non-designer. (Who probably can’t tell the difference between Comic Sans and Tekton.) They’re good, basic, boring work horses.

So … for typesetting technical documentation, why have I settled on none of these, but Myriad? Not because it comes free with Illustrator. But because it has a huge character set (great for typesetting in different languages), four widths and four weights, is space-saving and more readable at small sizes than Helvetica. Anyway the overview misses at least one “Frutiger-style” sans serif. Why? Helvetica is problematic in difficult reading conditions with its closed shapes. All the different numerals forming more or less an oval. That “e” making almost a circle. Letters with very small openings. All those things making it less than ideal when it comes to readability in less than ideal reading conditions. In addition Helvetica was drawn at a time before systematic typefaces with many different widths were a thing. So it’s a bit unsystematic. If it has to be “that sort of typeface” and I’m not trying to recreate a Helvetica, I’d always use Univers for its clean, cooler look …

I am sorry for Giambattista (we were born in the same city) but I don’t love Bodoni. I don’t like the shape of its serifs. Its contrast is too much. It’s good for short titles (it’s perfect on Vogue cover) but readibility gets hard in long texts. Here in Parma they used it almost everywhere: in some road signs, in museums, in the local newspaper. A publisher from Parma, Franco Maria Ricci, used it extensively throughout his life on everything he put out: books, magazines. Because of this I feel it is kind of overused. If I should choose one single font for the rest of my life it would be Garamond. It’s amazingly beautiful and timeless and suitable for both titles and text.

Much as I appreciate Massimo Vignelli’s work (I grew up in NYC, and the subway graphics were an early love of mine), it goes without saying that opinions can greatly differ on which fonts are “necessary”. Garamond? I mean, OK, it’s a good font, but there are a whole host of others that are similar and just as good. You can just as easily use Caslon, Jenson, Minion, etc, etc, etc, and Century and Times Roman/Times New Roman fall into this category, as well. All good classic serif fonts, some old, some quite new. Bodoni, and the rest of the similarly “modern” serif fonts have never been favorites of mine. Futura is meh. Not a big fan of geometrics. If you want a gorgeous modernist sans-serif, use Zapf’s Optima or Frutiger’s Univers. And Helvetica/Helvetica Neue is also nice, but again, there are tons of modernist and post-modernist sans-serifs out there that are just as good or better, like Myriad or de Groot’s Thesis, just to name two examples that have been widely popular since the 1990s. But what really needs to be talked about more is universal font families designed to work seamlessly globally, with multiple scripts, like Source/Noto. Designers in the 21st Century need to be more conversant with languages that don’t use Roman scripts.

Quite probably everybody can do with just a few fonts, possibly six. Perhaps the six chosen by Vignelli were the best for him, but that doesn’t make them the best for everybody else, or he would have been commissioned to use one or a few of them for a new logo for Coca Cola. Instead, one can now download several fonts inspired by the actual Coca Cola trademark.

Well,.. sort of agree that these fonts are pretty basic safe choices. I think the point is to work with these to get the hang of typesetting a bit, but I think there are better choices for the Serif typefaces. And to be honest, these are all typefaces popular in the US which when it comes to graphics design isn’t really the most visually exiting place. I agree with the sans serifs, Futura and Helvetica are standard for any designer. But Times? Exiting as a brick. The only reason it is still there is because it is a default MS font. The Garamond oozes old spice and is not all that legible. Bodoni,. yeah well.. no accounting for taste. I’d replace the serifs with some Dutch newsletter design for a bit more coherence in headline and text. One of my personal favs, Humanist is also a sans serif, but makes a nice replacement for more classic type serif. Far more versatile though. And for screen, the whole list can be tossed out as the pixel constraints destroy most typefaces. Since web pages are no longer constrained to 50 kb pages, you can easily step out of the web safe stuff and add something that works on screen. Technology constrains have really hurt typesetting and graphics design. HTML in general renders really ugly typography. SVG would have been able to remedy that, but Adobe and MS managed to kill that in the SVG 2.0 standard, which basically got neutered to protect their businesses. When it comes to marketing though, people tend to go with the tried and tested. but finding some type to express a certain feeling can lead you away from the list.

Fun articlebut i heartly disagree. Limiting yourself to a couple fonts just shows that you don’t understand typography or just don’t care about it very much. Limiting yourself as a designer to those fonts will take away one aspect of your work that can help you stand out. It’s like saying: “You don’t need all these colours, 16 base colours is enough for everything”. It’s just not true. These fonts dont even work as a fallback if you are doing screen design. If you’re not into typography then don’t do work that relies on a good understanding of that, like corporate design or brand identity or at least team up with someone that can do the typography side of things. If you pitch helvetica to a client – you are not helping them. period. (exept if they have been using comic sans before, but even then you can do better)

I think it is a good idea that people should stick to a rather small number of fonts. Whether that number should be six or whether it should be these six fonts ought to be an individual choice. Personally, I find Times Roman and Helvetica (Arial) very boring and overused. I also quite like the newer Microsoft fonts, such as Calibri and Cambrian. Also, for my line of work, there needs to be a fixed width font. But I ignore most of the other fonts and I find the long list of fonts a nuisance

I’ve not watched the article and already disagree. I could be wrong but I don’t think there really is a formula for creativity. There is a reason why so many fonts exist. I can understand keeping the number of fonts used in a particular project at a minimum say 2 or three. I can even understand having a particular set of fonts for most of YOUR projects. These should obviously reflect your style and complement the work itself. But to say that you only need THESE fonts is silly. Alright, now I will watch and see whether I’ve made a fool of myself.

My six personal favorite ‘time-tested’ fonts I would take with me on a desert island: – Microgramma/Eurostile (1950s) – Handel Gothic (1960s) – DIN (1930s) – Clarendon (1840s) – Avenir (1980s) – Helvetica Neue/Neue Haas Grotesk (1950s) I agree that it’s valuable to lean on type that is well-understood and is part of the visual language of the culture; but I also believe type design is an art, and like any other discipline it can grow as a medium through an understanding of what came before. Type designers have different concerns to generalist graphic designers though, and in the case of generalists, I would agree it’s best to find your voice with expertly-designed fonts that have proven themselves over decades at least.

I hate Helvetica and it’s variant. I should add characters that it doesn’t have, but I don’t usually bother because I just substitute it with Arial which is decently similar that I don’t care. Helvetica might be fine for English speakers, but for many other languages it’s not complete enough, whereas Garamond and Premier Garamond Pro (my all time favourite) are.

Is this article to be understood as good advice from the old master to the youth? Or should it just generate as many comments as possible? I’m always puzzled by general statements from the old masters when they come up with such an ultimate statement: “You have to take (this and that) and forget about the rest”. Times change, and sometimes other people have good, new ideas.

They discovered that Lexend Increased reading speeds scientifically? They tested it on 20 people, a tiny sample. Additionally they were all the same age, strangely only 8 out of 20 were male (for an unexplained reason) and five or so of the fonts were Lexend with only one that wasn’t (times new roman). Just by standard distribution five out of every six reads would automatically go to Lexend. Surely they should’ve done six different fonts one of which was Lexend? Highly unreliable Edit 4 years later: Just remembered this article and the silly comment I made about there being strangely only 8 males. There’s about a 50% chance to have a sex imbalance this severe (I’d have made a similar comment back then about 12 males and 8 females). So that point is rubbish but at least from skimming over the rest of the comment the rest of the trial issues still seem to be problematic.

Hi everyone, this is the typeface designer featured in the article, Thomas Jockin. I want to clarify Dr. Bonnie Shaver-Troup has conducted many studies over 20 years demonstrating the same conclusions as the study mentioned in the Cheddar article. The article described the methodology of one of these studies. On the question of different script systems, there is compelling evidence to suggest Lexend’s properties will have similar effects. I am currently working on the Arabic edition of Lexend with world known Arabic typeface designer, Nadine Chahine. Lexend Arabic will also be empirically tested for effectiveness. If you’d like to learn more please visit lexend.com I do hope these clarifications are helpful and thank you for your attention.

Very similar to Avenir, which is used for Blu-ray subtitles. Avenir and its predecessor, Futura, are sometimes criticized for being highly legible but not as readable as humanist typefaces such as Frutiger, Myriad, Noto Sans, Calibri and Carlito. Old-style serifs, such as Garamond, Minion Pro and Centaur, are usually considered the most readable.

You could’ve done something more interesting looking at the Dyslexie font which is more significantly adapted for readability. Also you missed the difference between font and and script, there being an exciting history of readability in calligraphy. Seriously, no mention of the Antiqua Fraktur dispute! This feels like an advert more than it does journalism

Serif vs Sans Serif – I remember hearing that Serif fonts were designed to be easier to read on paper and signs, especially at high dpi, because it draws your eye to the beginning and end of each character. But on digital screens that don’t have the same dpi as print, the serifs become a hindrance and so Sans Serif was created to clean it up.

my favorite font is Terminus. I set my terminal application to it because I’m writing code in NeoVim а text editor works in terminal application. Terminus makes easier to distinguish 1 (one) from l (letter L) or I (capital letter I), 0 (zero) from O (letter O), and it condensed so more information fits on the screen. Terminus is a perfect font for a programmer or system administrator.

It’s curious that the factors cited as responsible for this typeface’s improved readability include its being sans serif. From time immemorial typographers have insisted that serif fonts are better for body copy due to their superior readability, as serifs guide the reader’s eyes. Correspondingly, they have recommended that sans serif faces be used mainly for headlines and subheadings. How could thousands of committed professionals have gotten it so wrong for so long? Does one study, involving so few people and so few typefaces, really prove all of them wrong?

Former art director and communications manager here, the comprehension of typography involves a lot of different factors. The font is only one of them. Kerning, or the tightness of the letters, has nothing to do with the font specifically. Kerning can apply to any font. Readability in a printed book is vastly different than a web page based on the lighting in the room and the illumination of the page. Line length and line spacing also impact comprehension. Look at a typical Wikipedia page with its its long 120 character lines and liberal line spacing. Hover over any link on the page and it displays a message with much shorter lines with the same line spacing. Note how the shorter message is much easier to comprehend. For decades Apple used ITC Garamond, a serif fypeace, It was condensed and tightly kerned and helped to make the Macintosh a big seller with graphic designers like me. This comment at roughly 90 characters per line I suspect is set in Lexend since Google is using it. Is it easy to read? And how important is your browser magnification or your computer type size in its comprehension? Change your magnifcation to see how different type sizes with the same line length impact reading;

As a Swiss graphic designer I‘m sure those claims are not actually 100% true. If you would give me 5 different than serif fonts I could make them all readable and say which one will work best. But since it seems the only increased the spacing it does not work if you scale the font. The spacing should be dynamic considering the font size.

Great idea. I’m interested in fonts because I know how they effect reading and comprehension. I was never a good speller but my grades went drastically down when they switched the font to cursive in the spelling book. I had never really learned cursive and this made it hard. In college, I found out I was dyslexic.

When studying font design back at art university in the late 80’s, before the computers took over the world, we learned that a letter is legible in relation to the letters beside it and all the letters in a word. Easy examples are combinations like LI, LA, LT, IT, DT. Or lil, civ, rip, diw. Obviously the design of the L and the T should be different in the different combinations, and the spacing on the side of the i’s should be different. And a font hence not only have one L, one T, one i, etc. When printing was done with types there wasn’t just one L or one A, etc, there were many different of each depending on the combination. And different spacings between letters were taken into account for. And sometimes the were two letter combination types available. This is one reason to why the original Times News Roman was regarded as legible. All L’s weren’t the same, but adapted to the letter beside it, The I’s weren’t the same, but the spacing on either side of the I could be different. Today’s designers don’t seem to be aware of this… And I can’t understand how they can’t notice these things. But they just use letter as they are served. And the programmers providing apps like Words or Pages seem to have no clue. I mean today the selected version of a specific letter in the alphabet could be made rather automatic. Really every single word in the dictionary could be designed so the different letters are modified to make the word as eligible or aesthetically (the spacings between letters and inside letters….

That’s a good start, but it looks like the experiments essentially tested the effects of spacing/stretching on readability. So, there’s a lot more to experiment with. I also wonder if the results would have been much closer if a generic sans-serif font was used as the baseline, rather than times new roman. It might very well be that sans-serif fonts are more legible in general.

I go along with the majority. Times New Roman, the default WinWord font IS NOT especially readable. No surprise, because it was designed to maximize newsprint on a page. Of the built in Windows fonts, I prefer Century Schoolbook or Bookman Old Style more. And I DO like Comic Sans Serif for special purposes.

Over the centuries, printers tried to find type faces, not fonts which as ignorant computer geeks apparently thought could stand for both. Traditionally, a font is a certain typeface in a certain size. One of the reasons for using Comic Sans is that it is somewhat condensed and, therefore, takes up less room. This new typeface will take up more room. Sans serif typefaces are taller than serif type. IDK why.

From my past experiences with Times New Roman, Merriweather, and Georgia, Lexend definitely has an increase in speed among the 20 or so friends which I timed, reading the same excerpt written by myself. Although there is an improvement, a lot of it is psychological. Additionally, the currently business standard font is Times New Roman, and I doubt organizations will switch to fonts that appear very child-like. Lexend is essentially an easier to read version of Comic Sans, a font which I greatly dislike for its appearance alone.

As a person with LD I suffered through the ” your lazy ” crowd of educators in rural MN. One of them was the insistence that “serf’ type was best for me. Back when fonts were built in to printers. I had a hard time looking for fixed sans fonts until I started work as a UNIX admin in the early-mid 90s. This seems to be a bit like this.