So, which do you like best? Are some better for given purposes and unsuited for others?
Minion or Minion Pro. Clean, elegant, serifed font, late-Renaissance style, doesn’t draw attention to itself. Great for body text.
Anyhow, Arial is just a Helvetica wannabe. Arial can’t do anything that Helvetica doesn’t do better.
Times New Roman is a perfectly elegant typeface. Like Helvetica, it suffers from overuse, but they’re both classic and classy typefaces.
Anyhow, my general rule is for long blocks of text use a serifed font like Times New Roman or Minion. For shorter runs of text, sans-serifs like Helvetica are okay. I tend to use sans-serifs for headings and serifs for body text.
Plain old vanilla Arial. Easy to read.
I also use Tahoma a lot.
For some reason, Times New Roman is hard to read for my ageing eyes.
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I voted Times New Roman, but on reflection I much prefer typing in Fixedsys or another monospace font. Given a choice between Arial or TNR, though, I usually go with TNR.
Lucida Sans Unicode, italics.
Garamond or Bookman for personal documents (except screenplays)
Times New Roman for work documents and screenplays
Arial or Tahoma for spreadsheets
Calibri for headers and spreadsheets. Century Schoolbook, 11-point for body text.
DejaVu Sans, usually. Sometimes I’ll decide it’s too wide and pine for Helvetica, but the DejaVu triplets are good, workhorse typefaces.
Book Antiqua, I just happen to like how it looks.
Geneva
end up using comic sans ms a lot, just cause arial and times new roman bore the sh*t out of me
NOOOOOOOOOO!!!
My favorite for general purpose text is Trebuchet. For accent and emphasis, I’ve used lots of different fonts depending on my own mood and the mood I’m hoping to create.
The more noise the ban comic sans group makes, the more I like to use it. Actually, I really do find it appealing, the fact that using it pisses some people off is icing on the cake
Maybe this is true, but the way to keep the hipster high ground in this situation is to announce, dripping with disdain: “I’m using it ironically … so sorry you didn’t get the joke.”
The hipsters can keep the high ground all to themselves…I kind of like the “f*ck you and the horse you rode in on” approach.
Calibri - a nice clean font for technical documents and project proposals. Easy on the eyes and lacks the useless decorations that many serif fonts have.
It doesn’t piss me off. It just looks like a schoolgirl is sending me an email. I get the same impression from Comic Sans that I do from someone who writes in purple ink and dots their i’s with little hearts.
I tend to use Book Antiqua as my default serif font and Century Gothic as my sans serif. Book Antiqua looks, I dunno, classier to me and stands out from all of the Times New Roman that most, less-creative, people tend to use.
I prefer Century Gothic because it’s nice and round and scales well. And it stands out from Arial.
If anyone knows where I can get a free or cheap copy of Souvenir, I’d appreciate it. I’d throw Book Antiqua under the bus in favor of Souvenir in a heartbeat.
Ahem. While I do like Minion, Times New Roman is my default, because everyone has it, it’s easily readable, it doesn’t draw attention to itself, and it’s elegant. I’m a creative professional, but I don’t think it’s important to show your creativity through your typeface. Show it in your creative work. The fact that someone uses Times New Roman or Helvetica or Arial as their default font doesn’t mean they’re “less creative.” How absurd.
Sure, when you’re designing marketing materials or what not, it’s fine to play around with some distinctive typefaces, make things look a little more personalized. But in day-to-day stuff? Keep it simple.