Hi all! I am getting ready for a dinner out at P.F. Chang’s for a my friend Francis’ birthday (if I accented her name wrong, forgive me, I never quite caught on to how to use my apostrophes the right way – guess I was in goo goo land when I learned that one). Also, may hang out with my friend Carey, who I affectionately refer to as “Care Bear”.
I have a couple of fun projects up my sleeves that I hope to share later in the week, but for now I wanted to share this funny blog video that I saw on my bead bloggy friend Jean Yates. I don’t think you have to be a graphic designer to appreciate this, but it def. helps.
I think my favorite one is Futura! And I can’t believe my least favorite font saved the day. Ha ha. In all reality, in my daily graphic designing, I tend to gravitate to Futura, Garamond, and Helvetica. There are a few decorative fonts that I go to a lot (remember I work in a fun, crafty, cute style for labels and stickers) are Trashand, Blackjack, Duality, and Marydale. I notice that Blackjack is used a lot lately mainstream, so I need to find a new cursive and fun script to use. I don’t like to use the same fonts you are seeing everywhere else. For example, I used to love P22 Cezanne (like back in 2000), but then everyone started using it and soon it wasn’t a go to font for me. Just like songs on the radio, fonts can get pretty stale.
And for the record, my least favorite fonts are Comic Sans, Mistral, Sand (only exception is for scary Halloween design), and Zapfino (this one is rarely used right).
I have a few sites that I peruse for fonts on that feature free fonts:
Font Diner has the best retro fonts period. You prob. have seen a lot of them on packaging, but just didn’t notice.
Font Face has some great ones as well. Once you figure out the front page and how to navigate around it isn’t so bad. There’s a lot of TVesque fonts on this (I actually think they had to take down their version of the Buffy font at one point). If you use fonts from this site, please use them with caution. A font is only good when used properly and in the right setting.
If you are willing to pay a little for some nice fonts, My Fonts has some nice ones on there that are reasonable. They also have this awesome tool called What the font that helps you figure out a font if you are struggling with finding it on your machine. What I usually do is take a screen shot (for PC users, click here to figure out to take a screen shot and for Mac users learn how here. FYI…you may have to take it into a photo software program and crop it just to the text you wanted decoded. It is an awesome tool…when I found it, I was like…”Where have you been all my life??”
Also, The other day while looking in , I saw this cool site called Fontifier that easily lets you create a font from your own handwriting. I am very tempted to try it out!
I am no expert at all on fonts, but they are something I use on a daily basis. I really wish I understood them better and could properly ID them better and appreciate the design of them more and how they are made. If anyone has some cool font links, let me know!
Until next time Swellions!
Alexa
Back in my web designing days I used Garamond and Tahoma a lot. I don’t really know fonts to well any longer, but I used to be able to see Thanks for the great links! 🙂
Ack! Somehow my comment is missing part of a sentence. It should read “I don’t really know fonts to well any longer, but I used to be able to see a font and name it.”
Comic Sans is my least favorite too!
I’ve recently found some cool fonts at dafont.com. They aren’t perfect, but fun for some effects.
I love fonts, so much so that I have to curtail my font love or I get a little font crazy!
xoxo
Margot
Nancy, I can usually come up with them, but it sometimes takes a lot of thinking. I never used Tahoma. I’ll have to check it out.
Kristin: Comic Sans should only be used for school lunch menus or bulletin boards, though I once saw it used artfully on mtv.com and was quite impressed.
Margot: I’ll have to check that out. Yeah, it is easy to go overboard. Yikes!
My ace in the hole are the varying weights of Franklin Gothic. I recently did my resume on Word just using that font, but in different sizes and weights, of course.
Since this is all about fonts, I’m sure you have seen the documentary Helvetica. If you haven’t, you should rent it as soon as you can.
Yes, I’ve been wanting to see that one. OH, I love franklin gothic too and Gil Sans can be cool sometimes too. I’m not very big on Arial or Century Gothic. Arial just always looks so fat to me.
Arial seems to be a cheap imitation of Helvetica.
Interstate is a good headline font…I think the Herald-Leader uses a variation of that as its main headline font.
The Paducah Sun did a redesign last year, and they use Garamond Bold and Garamond Regular as their headline fonts. I tried to get them to buy some new fonts, but they didn’t want to spend the money.
Bonjorno, swelldesigner.blogspot.com!
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