Fonts: What do you use to write papers, articles, etc...
After reading through the font wars in this thread, I thought it would be nice to know what font people use to write school papers, brochures, letters, articles, basically anything they feed into a word processing program like Word, Nisus, etc.
I have always used Verdana because I like to standardize from the web page to the paper but with all the elegant font talk, I am ready to make a change when writing articles and papers but I am not a font expert by any means. I just want something easy on the eyes and attractive.
I have always used Verdana because I like to standardize from the web page to the paper but with all the elegant font talk, I am ready to make a change when writing articles and papers but I am not a font expert by any means. I just want something easy on the eyes and attractive.
Comments
Good job Apple and M$ continued to agree to support Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana etc on OS X. http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/08/02font.html
That rant aside, I tend not to use sans-serif fonts for main body text. I do often use Helvetica and Verdana (or similar) for captions, but due to the uniformity of the letters, they can be tiring to read. Serif fonts exist and evolve because they adopt technologies that people have found make text easier to read. I tend to like a wide-set serif like the traditional "New York" on the Mac, but also Garamond or even better, Book Antiqua. Book Antiqua has a particulary thick stroke, which I like. The Word template I use at work to produce memos, white papers, and the like uses mainly Book Antiqua. I like New York better, but Word is shit and can't embed fonts reliably. Everyone at my company has Book Antiqua.
For marketing collateral or anything that needs to look snappy, there are a few mildly-serif fonts that work well. Adobe's default "Myriad" is nice for titling but is over-used. Despite being sans serif, Gill Sans is a good but common choice as well for body text. Other nice, modern-looking fonts are Kepler and the somewhat new Hypatia Sans that Adobe gives gratis when you purchase CS3. The mildly-serif font type has become quite posh lately, so there are more varieties everyday.
Palatino is nice too (Palatino Linotype if you're on Windows), Book Antiqua is a rip-off of it but pretty decent nonetheless.
If you're looking for interesting fonts Typographica has their best of 2004 fonts, 'part one' of their best of 2005 fonts (there was no part two) and best of 2006 fonts.
I prefer Adobe Garamond Pro, if no font is mandated.
Palatino is nice too (Palatino Linotype if you're on Windows), Book Antiqua is a rip-off of it but pretty decent nonetheless.
Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, my work PC doesn't have Palatino, as it is a Windows craptop. I of course like Palatino, which has the added benefit of being a Postscript font. I find Palatino very easy to read on-screen, even when poorly rendered in Windows. I don't think a lot of people realize this, or we'd see it more often. Times, TNR, and Garamond are too light to look nice in Windows.
For the record, I have some "PowerToy" installed on my Windows laptop that improves the font rendering. I forget what it's called exactly, but it's from MS and shouldn't be too hard to find. Most people don't have this, though.