I love fonts. They have so many awesome uses. But asking a designer-type-person to pick a font is like asking a painter to pick a favorite color.
Well, there are totes fonts I dislike¹ and then there are fonts I enjoy a lot² but with the latter I think it really comes in waves. But so does the former. Like, right now I’m having this crazy obsession with late ’90s corporate UI design, not because I think it’s necessarily “good” or “pretty” but I think it has a symbolic significance³ and consequentially I’ve been enjoying fonts from the pre-ClearType era.
But if I’m really to pick a single font really fast and suddenly, I’d say
Frutiger, Adrian Frutiger’s Swiss highway font. I mean, it’s like super-influential right now with all these derivatives out there⁴ and I secretly hope it sweeps through and becomes the new
Helvetica⁵.
An annotated list of other fonts I enjoy:
- Univers – A groovy airport font that pioneered the Frutiger numbering system.
- Lucida Grande – Probably my favorite UI font ever designed. It gives Mac OS this character that contrasts the stark, corporate, utilitarian feel of Window’s Tahoma⁶.
- Chicago – To me, this bitmap font recalls the old Mac days, back when all fonts were named after cities⁷. I think this kind of has to do with my recent bitmap obsession. I bought a black and white iPod G4 Clickwheel for the purpose of having my MP3 player typefaced in this.
- Futura – A favorite of Stanley Kubrick, among others. My favorite font to use when I want to channel early Wes Anderson.
- Akzidenz-Grotesk – How can you possibly hate this font?
¹ such as Comic Sans, Arial.
² such as Helvetica, Futura.
³ I can’t remember if I ever made a post about this but basically aesthetically, not unlike how the B-movies of the ’70s/’80s “lovingly” recalled images of ’50s-era existential sci-fi horror, we are going to be channeling late ’90s iconography converting the feelings of fear and paranoia into, like, ones of nostalgia. The baby Internet era is essentially becoming “retro” and “cool”.
⁴ The mid-/late 2000s saw tons of Frutiger derivatives, such as Podium Sans, which was the UI Font of the iPod Video and other portable Apple products before they switched to Helvetica Neue Bold; Adobe’s Myriad Pro; and Windows’s Segoe UI, the latter of which resulted in a court case over alleged plagiarism.
⁵ fat chance but perhaps for the better? I’m not sure if it can withstand widespread satiation the way Helvetica does.
⁶ But when I say Tahoma, I really mean a homely hodgepodge of Arial, Microsoft Sans Serif, MS Sans Serif and Tahoma. Yum!
⁷ Shoutout to San Francisco, Geneva and Monaco! Especially the bitmap versions! All y’all be cool.
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Sofi posts are handcrafted in Seattle, Washington. Each one-of-a-kind post begins with a vision or dream and is the result of hours of research, drafting and revision.