In this article, I want to offer a method and a system, and I want to discuss 21 ‘archetypefaces’. On the other hand, Arial and Times Roman appear to have no appreciable difference from each other in how readers respond, despite the fact that they look totally different. A newspaper article set in Baskerville, for example, comes across as more credible than one set in Georgia, Helvetica or Trebuchet. However, every time that you see a document printed out or emailed in Comic Sans, it means that someone has made a deliberate (but entirely misguided) choice to use it rather than whatever their computer helpfully offered them.Ī few studies have been done into reader responses to a handful of typefaces. The most universally derided font in the world is Comic Sans. Every one of us faces font choices every day-something which could not be imagined even thirty years ago.

Let me say at this point that you do not need to be a designer to be reading this. In other words, being able to categorise a font is useful for librarians, but not for designers.

There are some very useful classification systems, but just because a typeface is a uniform slab-serif geometric (such as Rockwell), this doesn’t mean that it will make readers respond in the same way as other uniform slab-serif geometrics, or differently from a transitional humanist serif, a didone or a Swiss sans serif. It seems that there is no accepted theory of how to choose a typeface. However, over the last five years, I’ve run into a problem. It is the hard-wearing, hard-working ‘bread and butter’ typefaces which we see thousands of times a day as body text which set their design stamp on our visual world. Like almost everyone else who has retained their typographic passion, over the years my interest in the wonderfully weird has faded. Like everyone else with similar interests in those days, I bought the Letraset book and pored over the weird and wonderful typefaces like Odin and Galadriel. That began a lifetime struggle with understanding what typefaces were, how they worked, and how readers responded to them. At the age of fourteen I was given an art class assignment: design a typeface.

Bembo typeface free