100 Best Typefaces of All Time

In 1931, The Times of London commissioned a new text type design from Stanley Morison and the Monotype Corporation, after Morison had written an article criticizing The Times for being badly printed and typographically behind the times. The new design was supervised by Stanley Morison and drawn by Victor Lardent, an artist from the advertising department of The Times. Morison used an older... Read More

Basic Commercial is a font based on historical designs from the hot metal typeface era. It first appeared around 1900, and was created by type designers whose names have not been recorded but whose skills cannot be overlooked. This typeface's design has been popular among groups and movements as diverse as the Bauhaus, Dadaism, and the masters of Swiss/International-Style typography. It... Read More

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: "Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost... Read More

The successful Gill Sans® was designed by the English artist and type designer Eric Gill and issued by Monotype in 1928 to 1930. The roots of Gill Sans can be traced to the typeface that Gill's teacher, Edward Johnston, designed for the signage of the London Underground Railway in 1918. Gill´s alphabet is more classical in proportion and contains what have become known as his signature flared... Read More

Rockwell font appeared with Monotype Design Studio in 1934, a time which saw the return to popularity of slab serif fonts. Rockwell's strong and harmonious characters make this font particularly flexible.

The family that became FF Meta was first called PT55, an economical typeface made for easy reading at small sizes created for the West German Post Office in 1985. Erik Spiekermann later improved and expanded his design to include more weights and styles, and prepared its release as FF Meta, one of the first and truly foundational members of the early FontFont library. As desktop publishing... Read More

It was only after seeking the help of fellow type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby that Erik Spiekermann was able to fashion a suitable serif companion to his most famous sans, FF Meta. Rather than pasting serifs in place, the process took starting from scratch until a face appeared that looked and felt like a Meta, but that functioned more like a traditional seriffed text... Read More

On the way back to the airport from the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, Albert-Jan Pool and Erik Spiekermann discussed Pool’s prospects, Spiekermann knowing that his friend’s employer had just gone out of business. He suggested that if Pool wanted to make some money in type design, that he take a closer... Read More

Lucida is a family of fonts with one basic design, but offered in two variations. It has both serif and sans serif characters. Lucida is suitable for books/text, documentation/business reports, posters, advertisement, multimedia.

Sabon was designed by Jan Tschichold and released in 1967. Sabon was created in response to the specific needs of a group of German printers who wanted a typeface that would be identical in form when produced by three different metal-casting technologies. Named after Jacques Sabon, a sixteenth century typefounder whose widow married another typefounder, Konrad Berner, who is credited with... Read More

Today's digital font technology allowed the world-renowned typeface designer/calligrapher Hermann Zapf to finally realize a vision he first had more than fifty years ago: creating a typeface that could capture the freedom and liveliness of beautiful handwriting. The basic Zapfino™ font family, released in 1998, consists of four alphabets with many additional stylistic alternates that can be... Read More

FF Letter Gothic is a family designed by Albert Pinggera based on the old IBM “Letter Gothic” typewriter faces. As the name suggests, this version is not monospaced, but is proportionally-spaced for setting text. A monospaced version is available; see FF Letter Gothic Mono. Each of FF Letter Gothic Text’s three weights is accompanied by a true italic companion. As is the case with many families... Read More

Sumner Stone worked together with Bob Ishi of Adobe to create the Stone family fonts, which appeared in 1987. Coincidentally, ishi is the Japanese word for stone, which precluded any squabbling about whose name the font would carry. The family consists of three types of fonts, a serif, a sans-serif and an informal style. The Stone fonts are very legible and make a modern, dynamic impression.

In designing Minion font, Robert Slimbach was inspired by the timeless beauty of the fonts of the late Renaissance. Minion was created primarily as a traditional text font but adapts well to today's digital technology, presenting the richness of the late baroque forms within modern text formats. This clear, balanced font is suitable for almost any use.

Myriad® was designed in 1992 by Robert Slimbach, Carol Twombly, and the design staff at Adobe Systems. It's a humanist sans serif typeface, meaning that the forms are primarily based on classic romans, much like conventional or classic serifed fonts but without the serifs. Myriad also has subtle geometric shaping and monotone color, balanced by varying letter widths and open counter shapes. A... Read More

Rotis® is a comprehensive family group with Sans Serif, Semi Sans, Serif, and Semi Serif styles, for a total of 17 weights including italics. The four families have similar weights, heights and proportions; though the Sans is primarily monotone, the Semi Sans has swelling strokes, the Semi Serif has just a few serifs, and the Serif has serifs and strokes with mostly vertical axes. Designed by... Read More

The English stone carver, artist, and typographer Eric Gill conceived the Joanna typeface as a personal design for use in books printed at his "Joanna Press." Gill saw his press work there as a continuation of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, pioneered in the 19th Century by William Morris. Joanna is notable for its almost vertical "upright" italics, and the unusally small size of its... Read More

Palatino Arabic is a collaboration between Lebanese designer Nadine Chahine and Prof. Hermann Zapf. The design is based on the Al-Ahram typeface designed by Zapf in 1956 but reworked and modified to fit the Palatino nova family. The design is Naskh in style but with a strong influence of the Thuluth style as well. This is evident in the swash-like finials and the wide proportions of the... Read More

FF Erikrighthand and FF Justlefthand are two of the first examples of loose, natural handwriting made to work as type. The software used to produce the designs was just being developed. It certainly didn’t hurt that Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum actually know “how to write.” That’s not to imply that van Blokland and van Rossum were merely literate, but rather that had been taught... Read More

American graphic designer William Addison Dwiggins' (W.A.D. for short) first typefaces were the Metro family, designed from 1927 onward. The project grew out of Dwiggins' dissatisfaction with the new European sans serif typefaces of the day, such as Futura, Erbar, and Kabel, a feeling he expressed in his seminal book Layout in Advertising. Urged by Mergenthaler Linotype to create a solution... Read More

When ITC Officina was first released in 1990, as a paired family of serif and sans serif faces in two weights with italics, it was intended as a workhorse typeface for business correspondence. But the typeface proved popular in many more areas than correspondence. Erik Spiekermann, ITC Officina's designer: "Once ITC Officina got picked up by the trendsetters to denote 'coolness,' it had lost... Read More

The Englishman William Caslon punchcut many roman, italic, and non-Latin typefaces from 1720 until his death in 1766. At that time most types were being imported to England from Dutch sources, so Caslon was influenced by the characteristics of Dutch types. He did, however, achieve a level of craft that enabled his recognition as the first great English punchcutter. Caslon's roman became so... Read More

A.M. Cassandre designed Peignot in the 1930s and the font reflects a feel of the times. It is a product of the New Typography, to which Bauhaus artists like Moholy-Nagy contributed. Peignot's most outstanding characteristic is found in the lower case alphabet, which is actually composed of a mixture of lower case and upper case forms. Especially popular for advertisements, Peignot font makes a... Read More

FF Info is named after its purpose: the transfer of information. Its clean lines make no fashion statements, nor do they attempt any technical wizardry. The typeface was initially intended for use on traffic signage,and other wayfinding systems in stations, on buildings, etc. Because space comes at a premium in such situations, FF Info Display is drawn narrow; It requires 15% less space than... Read More

FF Dax is without doubt Hans Reichel’s magnum opus. The design is a contemporary streamlined sans in three widths: normal, wide, and condensed. Suprisingly, FF Dax Condensed was the first to be released, in 1995. The concept behind the typeface was to combine the clarity of a condensed Futura with a more humanist touch. The result is a space saving and legible typeface of timeless quality. The... Read More

FF Max is a Danish sans inspired by Aldo Novarese’s Eurostile (1962). The letter shapes in FF Max have rounder, friendlier forms, giving the typeface a certain human touch. FF Max works well as a headline face for magazines and newspapers, but sets text with surprising ability too.

The first cuts of Trade Gothic were designed by Jackson Burke in 1948. He continued to work on further weights and styles until 1960 while he was director of type development for Mergenthaler-Linotype in the USA. Trade Gothic does not display as much unifying family structure as other popular sans serif font families, but this dissonance adds a bit of earthy naturalism to its appeal. Trade... Read More

Gerard Unger developed Swift™ between 1984 and 1987, with the intention of making a modern digital type for newspapers. The project was undertaken for the German firm Dr.-Ing Rudolf Hell GmbH. At that time, newspapers were produced on high-speed presses with low quality paper. Unger says Swift is "designed to be a survivor." It has chunky triangular serifs, sturdy connections at junctures,... Read More

FF Blur is from FontFont’s earliest period, made in 1991 by British designer Neville Brody. The typeface was developed by blurring a grayscale image of an existing grotesque and then vectorizing what remained. Though deceptively simple, his process was imitated widely afterward, with mediocre results. Notwithstanding the knock-offs, FF Blur entered the zeitgeist of early and mid-1990s design,... Read More

Industria™ was designed by British graphic design guru Neville Brody, originally for a magazine called The Face, and released as a font by Linotype GmbH in 1989. Industria is a condensed sans serif with abbreviated, essential forms. It has a systemized mechanical structure of straight strokes with rounded outer corners and rectangular counter spaces. The solid version is strong, cool, and... Read More

FF Fago is the quintessential corporate typeface, a result of many years of work within the challenges and requirements of complex corporate design projects. The family offers five finely balanced weights across three widths, enough for virtually any conceivable application. Its various widths were carefully planned and drawn to complement and combine with each other. Aside from the impressive... Read More

While designing Trajan, Carol Twombly was influenced by the style of carved letters produced by the Romans during the first century AD. Twombly completed the design, adding numerals and punctuation, as well as a bolder version to allow for text emphasis. Most importantly, her interpretation of the ancient style resulted in a font family whose clarity and beauty come across in modern printed... Read More

The Souvenir typeface was originally drawn by Morris Fuller Benton in 1914 as a single weight for the American Type Founders company. It was revived in 1967 by Photo-Lettering and optimized for phototypesetting equipment. ITC was formed in 1971 and, with the help of Photo-Lettering, introduced ITC Souvenir as one of its first font families. ITC Souvenir was designed by Ed Benguiat and comes... Read More

Just as popular as the digital typewriter face FF Trixie are those in the FF Instant Types series: FF Confidential, FF Dynamoe, FF Flightcase, FF Karton, and FF Stamp Gothic. Named after the places each comes from, these fonts feature familiar character sets from everyday letters and figures all around us: packaging, flight cases, children’s stamp boxes, Dymo tape labelers. We see them every... Read More

The first slab serif fonts appeared at the beginning of industrialization in Great Britain in 1820. Clarendon and Ionic became the names for this new development in England, known as English Egyptienne elsewhere in Europe. Clarendon is also the name of a particular font of this style, which, thanks to its clear, objective and timeless forms, never lost its contemporary feel. In small point... Read More

London-based designer David Quay designed ITC Quay Sans in 1990. One of the precursors to the long run of functionalist European sans serif faces that has been a dominating force in type design since the 1990s, ITC Quay sans is based on the proportions of 19th Century Grotesk faces. Grotesk, the German word for sans serif, defines an entire branch of the sans serif movement, which culminated in... Read More

The full ITC Legacy collection of fonts, which includes faces that first became available in the early 1990s, is based on the Eusebius typeface by Nicolas Jenson, the French engraver, printer and pioneer typographer who created the design centuries ago in 1470. Jenson's original design featured distinctive slab serif shapes and asymmetrical foot serifs, which Arnholm carried over into his work.... Read More