5 Handpicked Fonts for Life-ish: My Font Quiver
I have always wanted to have a quiver of just 3–5 typefaces to rely on when it comes to my design work. So that’s what I did, and you should too.
I have been a Designer (Graphic Designer to Web Designer to Front-End Web Developer to UI/UX Designer) for over 10 years, and like most designers I have a fondness (or shall I dare say fontness)for Typography.
I am not a snooty designer that can tell you the history of long lost typefaces, or even someone that only buys fonts and never uses free fonts. In fact, I don’t care if you call them fonts, typefaces or pretty letter words. However, I do feel that one reason all designers should have strong feelings for fonts is because of the forced limitations they can gives us and the resulting creativity that can be sparked from that.
I have heard many designers and creatives say something to the effect of, “creativity comes from limitations”.
Currently, I have a de facto limitation in that I try to only use fonts that are free for me and my clients. I am sure most of you have downloaded from Font Squirrel, Lost Type, Google Fonts, or god forbid Da Font — and there is nothing wrong with that. I applaud you for it and don’t let others make you feel any less of a designer for doing so.
But I want to take it further and you should too!
I have selected five fonts from these free font sites that I keep as my personal font quiver, and want to share it with you.
This doesn’t mean you should only use these five. Pick the ones you like, remove the ones you hate, and add the ones you love. Also, let them inspire you to create you own custom flair to them by outlining them and then altering them for specific logos and brands.
You will be surprised what you can come up with when you start with a basic san-serif font and start to: cut the corners off, round some corners, disconnect parts of letters, thin out certain parts of letters, etc. Get creative!
A Guide to Creating Your Font Quiver
To build my quiver I needed to establish some rules/qualifications for font families. These will probably, and should, change over time. You will start to learn what your natural aesthetic is by discovering things you like about certain letter shapes, and more importantly what you hate about certain letter shapes.
The Basics: Serif, Sans Serif, Slab Serif — oh my!
To keep it simple stupid, lets start by limiting the noise. There are a lot of different classifications for font: serif, sans-serif, slab serif, monospaced, gothic, humanist, display, script. You will need a great serif font and a great sans- serif font. So there is 2 0f our 5 right there. I am also going to include a slab serif, to round out the top 3.
Be patient and give your talent for creativity some respect.
I know, right now you are thinking, “Matt, this is not going to work you only have 2 spots left.” Be patient and give your talent for creativity some respect.
My natural aesthetic leans more to sans-serif or display type fonts, so for the final two spots I looked more towards fonts that give off a different feeling than the others in the quiver, and/or have lots of flexibility in letter alternatives.
So to sum up the qualifications for the font quiver, we have:
- Serif (classic and simple)
- Sans-Serif (utilitarian, lots of styles: thin, medium, bold etc…)
- Slab-Serif (nothing heavy, just a stronger serif really)
- Sans-Serif (Lots of alternative letter shapes and glyphs)
- Sans-Serif (Retro-ish, substitute with your favorite flavor)
My Font Quiver
Serif: Playfair Display, Download
Playfair Display is a beautiful font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen. It is elegant, refined and nods to classic fonts of the past, like Baskerville. The numbers by default are “old style”. This means that some numbers (34579) drop below the baseline while others (68) are taller. Do not fear, because Playfair Display has alternatives for “tabular lining” for its numbers, meaning that you can have the numbers all the same height.
Sans-Serif: Roboto, Download
Roboto is a neo-grotesque sans-serif typeface family developed by Google-(from Wikipedia). Its a great, dare I say, modern approach to the classic Helvetica font designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann. This font works a great base to let your creativity go wild.
Slab-Serif: Roboto Slab, Download
Well, if Roboto is so damn good — why not use its sibling for a slab-serif! Roboto Slab can look heavy and industrial when thick, or elegant and playful when thin. It also pairs great with san-serif fonts as headers or sub text or even with serif fonts as lead paragraphs. Who doesn’t love that!
Sans-Serif: Raleway, Download
This will probably be the most controversial font on the list. Snooty designers love to hate on Raleway mainly because of the “w”. Raleway’s “w” is a Tell-tale sign that someone is using it on a design or webpage. And I agree that it is not the best looking “w”, but Raleway is super flexible! It has alternatives for almost every letter you wish you could change, including “w”. It also comes in: extra light, light, regular, medium, semibold, bold, extra bold, and heavy. I mean come on, its just not fair to the other fonts on your computer. Give it a try and explore the alternatives and glyphs.
Sans-Serif/Display: Bebas Neue, Download
This is where I inject my personal flavor. Bebas Neue is a font from Ryoichi Tsunekawa and comes in 5 weights: Thin, Light, Book, Regular, and Bold. It is not the most flexible font since it only contains uppercase letters, but its classic tall and skinny letter forms do a great job of looking authoritative. Not to mention, it also has a great retro feel.
Note: I also rely on some very basic fonts in my system, especially for web fonts. Include Helvetica, Arial and Georgia. Those fonts will give you some flexibility and fall backs, but don’t lean on them for the main typography of your design. Flex that creativity and push yourself!
Re-evaluate
I think its important to re-evaluate your font quiver, but remember this is supposed to be a design limitation to spark creativity. That means don’t give yourself an easy out by changing your quiver every month, or even every year.
Every 12–18 months, take a look at your body of work and a close look at all your font families together on one page. What does your gut tell you? Does your eye see any patterns or points of weakness?
Try hard not to swap out all five fonts. Pick the one that seems the most out of place or not up to par with the others. Then start the search all over again!
