Best of 2006 Fonts

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Best Fonts of 2006

With each new year, we reflect on the great fonts that appeared on MyFonts during the previous year. In this newsletter we present to you the best fonts from the top ten font design styles of 2006: best text font, retro font, ornament font, techno, Roman, formal script, handwriting, brush script, grunge, and calligraphic fonts.

To keep things fair, we let you—the customer—be the ultimate judge of results by using sales numbers to decide each winner. Thank you for putting together such a nice list!

Drumroll please…

A fully-featured text font family with a wide range of expert options

The best selling font for setting paragraph text this year was Camingo, a highly legible modern sans serif typeface. This came as no surprise, considering Camingo's contemporary sturdy-yet-humanistic design.

It also doesn't hurt that it is available in a wide range of seven weights (ExtraLight through Black) and has a rich set of options for all kinds of expert typographic features like small caps, ligatures, and alternate glyphs.

A modern take on a clean Art Deco style

Though Estilo Script won the crown for best retro font of 2006, it is very usable in a contemporary context. The clean Art Deco lines end with rounded terminals, resulting in an elegant simplicity just as modern as it is reminiscent of the posh lettering of the 1930s.

Estilo Script offers plenty of design possibilities with its cursive OpenType ligatures, small caps, and Greek characters. Naturally, Estilo Script is the perfect companion for its sister font Estilo.

Embellishing ornaments with flair

The best ornament font of 2006, Fleurons Two, gets its name from an historic term used to describe botanically-shaped typographic ornaments. It is the second in a series of similar fonts designed by Gert Wiescher, who studied older fleurons before creating these modernized interpretations.

Traditionally, fleurons were used to subtly embellish a typographic layout. Indeed, the designs within Fleurons Two can be used to this effect, but they were also designed with enough detail to function at much larger sizes, as beautiful dominant forms within a layout.

A space-age font for futuristic designs

Ray Larabie's bold futuristic font, Korataki, wins the award for 2006's best techno font.

Korataki's wide, squarish letters evoke the classic vision of what the future will look like: robot assistants, flying cars, and pill-sized meals. This makes it a perfect typeface to use in your hi-tech designs.

Not only does Korataki look great in English, but it also has options to support a wide range of languages, from Croatian to Japanese (and more)!

A distinct Roman font with classic style

Inspired by classic Roman inscriptional capitals and other master works of lettering, Cyan was perfectly suited to be the best Roman font of 2006.

Some of the unique characteristics of Cyan are its open counter forms and compact serifs. These features are matched well between the upper and lowercase letters, creating a distinctively elegant and unified feeling.

Design considerations have been made with Cyan to make it easily readable at small sizes, but it also has many other subtle details which can be appreciated in larger sizes.

Cyan is a perfect companion to Cyan Sans.

An expert script font with a character set as lavish as its curves

The best formal script font from 2006 is P22 Zaner. Zaner is a superbly elegant script by Paul Hunt, based on the ornamental penmanship of Charles Paxton Zaner. It is perfect for use in wedding invitations and other such designs where lavish calligraphy is desired.

One factor that raises Zaner above many other formal script fonts is its unbelievably vast offerings when it comes to various alternate character options. For example, there are as many as 9 (!) different versions of the capital Z choose from, each with a unique frilly style of its own.

And, as if that wasn't enough, Zaner also offers a wealth of embellishing ornaments, snap-on swashes, luxurious illustrations, and the like.

The full power of Zaner's features are best experienced when using the OpenType versions—a marvel of modern type technology!

An attractive and realistic handwriting font

DearJoe 4 is the official choice of MyFonts customers for the best handwriting font of 2006.

Other than its attractive loose style, the font has several features which make it particularly successful when emulating casual handwriting. For example, the characters were designed to connect to each other within each word, as they would be in real hand-written script. Also, the font has a subtly imperfect texture built in to it, further portraying a feeling as though the words were written directly on the surface by hand.

A brush script font with bold, alluring style

With its sultry curves and contemporary style, TheNautiGal earned its spot for the best brush script font of 2006.

Font designer Rob Leuschke put his past experience as a lettering artist at Hallmark Cards to good use when creating TheNautiGal. This alluring script manages to maintain a great balance between sass and formality while seamlessly connecting appropriate letters for a natural script style.

A grunge font as bold as it is messed up

2006's best grunge font is Boycott, brainchild of Japanese architect and type designer, Ryoichi Tsunekawa.

Even though, by its "grunge" definition, Boycott's characters are noisy and damaged, the typeface still maintains an admirable balance between bold legibility and Punk Rock attitude, making it perfect for attention grabbing, in-your-face designs.

Another favorable feature of Boycott is that there are, between the upper- and lowercase, 2 versions of each letter… one more roughed up than the other. This comes in handy when setting a word that has two of the same letter together (eg, the two Ts in "ROTTEN"), as you can reduce the distracting repetition of character-specific grunge marks.

A masterfully expressive calligraphy font

The best calligraphic font and #1 font of 2006 is Swan Song. Reflecting the rich lettering period of the mid-20th century, Swan Song's brush strokes were created in the spirit of calligrapher Professor Alexander Nesbitt.

Swan Song has a quick and irregular feeling but is nonetheless artistic, as one might expect the handwriting of a master calligrapher to be. This overall style is perfect when the words being communicated must be seen as contently informal yet confident.

You can also see all these fonts together in the Best of 2006 font album at MyFonts.