I wasn’t quite sure how to title this, but my question is about fonts that work well together. What’s a good sans that works well with a certain serifed typeface? (or font? Not sure about the difference between font and typeface, although I feel like I should.) I don’t know of any that work like this. Maybe there would be better matches if both types had been around since the time of Gutenberg.
I’m just looking for a pair that would compliment each other on the same document. Have any been designed with this in mind? I mean, are there any that are Fontname Serif and Fontname Sans? (pref. free, of course.)
Three classic combinations, off the top of my head:
[ul][li]Futura and Garamond[/li][li]Helvetica and Times Roman[/li][li]Franklin Gothic and Times Roman[/ul][/li]And two helpful articles:
[ul][li]Typefaces That Work Together[/li][li]Mix & Match[/ul][/li]The Helvetica/Times combination became nearly universal in the early days of desktop publishing because these faces were part of the standard font set for PostScript printers, and loads of documents were then cranked out with them, as if on autopilot. If you’re on a PC, there’s a similar combination with Arial and Times New Roman, which are standard Windows fonts, and therefore free. The problem, though, is that their very ubiquity will make your documents look bland and undistinguished, if that’s a concern to you.
Franklin Gothic and Times, IIRC, were used by Fortune magazine (and maybe TIME, too). Actually, it’s probably a good idea to go through magazines and notice what fonts they use for inspiration – if you don’t already recognize the faces, however, you’ll then either have to sit down with a type specimen book and puzzle them out or try to remember their characteristics and see if you can find them via WhatTheFont, which, I realize, can be painful.
There are entire font families that are designed as unified sets to include both sans and serif faces. An example would be Lucida, where its sans-serif style is standard with Windows, but you’ll probably have to pay for the others unless you’ve installed an application that comes buncled with them.
Type pairings is a subject to which entire books have been devoted. But, for free, you can try the online app. Esperfonto (still in beta) and see how it works.