Now, I’m no artist in the visual sense. But over a year ago, I discovered typography. Rather, I started looking at fonts differently.

Note: a font is a member of a typeface, much like Times New Roman Italic is a font whereas Times New Roman is a typeface.

You have plenty on your computer, including the most widely used typefaces in the world: Helvetica and Times New Roman. Some of those you have look old and refined (Baskerville), while others look modern and even futuristic (Eurostile).

Yet have you ever felt tired of them? Times New Roman is everywhere. Every student has to use it for his/her papers (or be punished for not conforming), and most people who think their computer only has Word and Internet (i.e. Internet Explorer, plague of the web) have never tried discovering the other typefaces.

I’ve felt tired of Times New Roman. Many, many times. So I decided to take a look at other typefaces I could use.

One upon which I stumbled was Avenir. Well, I bought Avenir. And I now use it in my C.V., on the buttons at the top of this website, in my lecture notes for main titles, in my list of films we own, …
To me, it’s simply become irreplaceable. It’s simple, clean, readable from afar, and holds my number one spot among the “sans serif” fonts (the second being Gill Sans).

The second for which I discovered a special inkling was Bembo. It’s become my favourite “serif” font, ahead of Baskerville, and I use it in my lecture notes, my law & case-law compilations, my C.V., and so on.

In truth, typography, in your daily life, reflects part of who you are. Most people don’t know a thing about typography because they haven’t ever questioned the computer on which they work. But if you have ever ventured into the world of typography, you start to look for something that corresponds to what you like.

I like things that are elegant, different, clean. Maybe these two typefaces do correspond, in a way…
To illustrate the opposite, I hate Comic Sans MS. Truly. I think it’s the most horrible of the widely used typefaces, because it tries to be “fun” but is more “childish” than anything else. I wouldn’t mind it if it were rarely used or used only by kids and young teenagers. But after the age of 14, I think it’s immature to use such an unrefined typeface. I guess that means I’m serious…

So I decided I would do the same this term, though this time, we had far fewer courses in common. And at the end of the term (a week ago), I was thinking about how I would make the notes available: Word .doc and Adobe PDF, as usual, or just PDF? I work in Pages ’08, so converting to .doc is always a bother. At the same time, I noticed that the course titles were in Times New Roman. And I thought: “Eugh.”

So began my quest for “the perfect font”.

I’ve amassed a substantial collection of “quality” free fonts over time, and Leopard, along with a number of other applications (probably many I’m not even aware played a role), has provided me with a great deal of “quality” commercial fonts too. But flipping through my font collection, I stumbled upon a font that rendered my titles really nicely: Avenir. I can’t believe I never used that before, because it is very, very pretty.

Anyway, following this “discovery”, I decided to compile a list of my favourite fonts, in the hopes of finding the best among them. And here are the results:

• for titles: Avenir* and Gentium Basic**
• for smaller titles: Baskerville* and Fontin**, along with the two “title” fonts
• for text: Anivers**, Avenir*, Bitstream Vera Serif**, Bookman Old Style*, Century Gothic*, Fertigo**, Fontin**, Gentium Book Basic**, Gentium Basic**, Legendum**, Linux Libertine** and MgOpen Cosmetica**

Legend: * = commercial; ** = free

Indeed, you won’t find any “classic” ones among this list. Times New Roman, I feel, is outdated (and I get the impression I’ll change my default font soon enough). Lucida Grande is great as a system font on OS X, and it’s the “perfect web font” right now, given that it’s the most elegant widely-used font, but it’s not the best for printing. And well, I won’t even mention the others (except Calibri, Microsoft’s new font, which almost made this list, and is the first positive thing I’ve seen from Microsoft in a while).

So there, you have my personal choices. If I can find the money, I’ll seriously think about purchasing part of the new “Avenir Next” typeface, because Avenir seems to have made it into every single category mentioned (and it’s my personal favourite, despite the very limited version I have of it).

But yes, there are high quality, very readable fonts out there. And many of them are free.