30 Fonts That ALL Designers Must Own
Written by Jacob Cass on Sunday, March 2, 2008 – 11:04 pm -
Here are 30 of the Best Fonts / Typefaces that every designer must own sorted by alphabetical order. There are 15 serif fonts and 15 sans-serif fonts. These fonts will last you your whole career!
A brief description of what each font is best suited for is provided however are not limited to this.
There are some top free cool fonts that are downloadable in this collection and some that come with your operating system… the others are not so free but they sure will help you improve your typography! They include original PC, Mac and Truetype fonts.
You may also be interested in How To Choose A Font or the Top 5 Typography Resources of all time. Also don’t forget to subscribe!
15 Serif Fonts
1. Adobe Caslon
Magazines, journals, text books, corporate communication.
2. Adobe Garamond
Textbooks and magazines
3. Bembo
Posters, packaging, textbooks.
4. Bodoni
Headlines, text, logos. (I couldn’t get big preview for this font.)
5. Clarendon
Dictionaries and headlines.
6. Courier
Tabular materials, technical documentation, word processing.
7. Excelsior
Newsletters, Reports, Proposals.
8. Lucida
Low resolution printing, small point sizes, reversed out half tones.
9. Minion
Limited edition books, newsletters, packaging.
10. Perpetua
For displays with fine lettering, long pages of text, chiseled text.
11. Sabon
Books and corporate communication.
12. Stempel Schneidler
For displays and fine publications that need a legible text type.
13. Times New Roman
Newspapers, magazines, corporate communication.
14. Trajan
Books, magazines, posters, billboards, anything to do with the ages or religion.
15. Walbaum
Magazines, journals, text books, corporate communication.
15 Sans-Serif Fonts
1. Akzidenz Grotesk
Large Signage, all purpose for print media.
2. Avenir
For books with large amounts of text
3. Bell Centennial
For listings and very poor printing conditions.
4. Bell Gothic
For very small amounts of text that contains large amounts of information.
5. DIN
For signage, posters and displays.
6. Franklin Gothic
Newspapers and where available space is limited.
7. Frutiger
Large signage, all purpose font for print media.
8. Futura
Large displays, small text in books.
9. Gill Sans
Signage, all purpose font for print media.
10. Helvetica
Large or small text, all purpose type figure.
11. Meta
Text, number, especially corporate communication.
12. Myriad
Large displays, all purpose media.
13. Trade Gothic
Newspapers and classified ads, advertising, multimedia.
14. Univers
Packaging, signage, text books.
15. Vag Rounded
Instruction manuals and print advertising.
Source: From the book “30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime” by Imin Pao and Joshya Berger. A history of typography is also found in this book as well as more information on each font and the designer.
To buy most of the fonts above I would recommend MyFonts or ITC Fonts however you must shop around!
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What are your favourite 3 fonts? Any fonts that should or shouldn’t be here?
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Nice list, and dugg. But I’m disappointed that you don’t have links to the fonts.
I’m not the typical Digg crowd, but those that are digg crowd-ish, will bury you for that Google AdSense unit. I have experience that suggests that you should remove them or else be buried (you won’t get much clicks from diggers, SU is better).
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hehe… I’ve started writing a post on these 30 fonts last year, but somehow left it in my Drafts and never got back to it. I do like your approach and brief notes on when each of these types works the best.
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Thanks Sumesh, I have added new links. The adsense ads are only there to cover my hosting costs but maybe that is why I have not been as successful on Digg as other social media sites.
Vivien, well I ’spose slow and steady didn’t win the race this time
Nice list. I’m not a big fan of the serif fonts, but the sans-serif are top notch
ha… most of them look the same. i not agreee with the list.
cool, I always wondered the difference between sans-serif and serif I just never cared enough to actually look it up.
thanks to your convenient wiki links, I learned today so thank you.
I take it you limit yourself to only one specific type of design then?
Nowhere near enough diversity in this font list, although I will admit there are some absolute necessities in there.
Ric.
I’m going to have to disagree concerning Trajan. It’s used too much.
This post sucks. Why?
1) its called “30 Fonts That ALL Designers Must Own” but you could not find a preview for Bodoni (don’t you OWN the fonts?).
2) Showing the name of the font in preview? Seriosly, how does the rest of the font look like? next time try with “The Quick Brown Fox…”
3) Vag Rounded on instruction manuals?
Burried
I wish you included a link to download them! No wonder people come form Digg for it getting disappoint only seeing a review!
Good Luck
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I personally LOVE Comic Sans. Very versatile.
I have been looking for a font with an over sized period (.) Anyone know where to find one?
Great selection of fonts. And is interesting how you specify the way that these can and are used. A font that i really like that was not included in the sans-serif font is Interstate, a very clean and readable typeface that can be used in a number of ways. I am not sure if it a font a designer MUST own, but it is in my list of top sans serif font.
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These choices seem almost too obvious to me… but it’s a good list nonetheless.
Great lineup of fonts, I have a standard attitude towards fonts that cost hundreds of dollars, there are so many nice ones available for free, so I would never pay for a font, got to keep the cost down for the client.
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Well, I agree with many of the selections I disagree with a few as well. I know they’re culled from a book, so please don’t think I’m criticizing you, but the original authors.
Courier? Seriously? I could go my entire life without using a monospaced font. If we want technical, typewriter-styled fonts there are quite a few others out there that are not kerned so horribly.
I personally don’t see the need for Bell Centennial ever, since there are many quite good fonts out there that will suit its purpose.
Meta…and don’t get me wrong I friggin LOVE meta, is quite trend laden, and isn’t a lifetime type of font like Garamon or Sabon. Meta’s was back ‘in’ last year, so expect it to be ‘out’ for 2008.
And I’d completely disagree with them regarding Times. Nobody ‘needs’ Times New Roman, but it’s ubiquity simply means we’ll never get rid of it. For you aspiring typographers out there, anything where Times will suit, try Minion or Garamond instead.
I’m surprised that there isn’t a single ‘web friendly’ font like Georgia or Verdana in the list. These fonts are important because they are designed better for on-screen reading compared to others (turn of anti-alising on your system and look at these fonts…they’re still legible at nearly every size, now look at Garamond without it…yuck.) which is critical today, and will definitely be needed for a lifetime.
Really nice article. Don’t worry about the adsense words. That won’t prevent you from getting popular on Digg…it’s mostly hit or miss. Adsense ads are the least obtrusive. For everything else, most digg users us adblock.
Nice work and congrats on making it to the front page.
Nice list but some of these are incredibly expensive, $695.00 for the Akzidenz-Grotesk BE Collection? Not all designers can afford all of these so I don’t particularly agree with the ‘must own’ part but I must admit I sure want them!
Nice list. 3 favorite or missing fonts would be; Clearview, Garamond 3 which is a better cut that Adobe Garamond, and the incomparable Scala Sans.
no script font?
I would have liked to see information on the licenses covering usages of such fonts. None seem to be free.
nice fonts selected! A personal one I would add is FF Meta Serif. A new font, however fantastically designed.
It would be nice if the Serif fonts listed if they have small caps for numbers. (Georgia has small caps for numbers).
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It seems like most of the serifs were found in an Adobe font list. I like the list of sans much better, they can be much more useful/fun.
Best fonts? Why? By who’s metric? What justifies these as the “BEST”? Simply your say so?
WHAT?!?! Papyrus isn’t #1???
What a crock…
For Serif faces, I think ITC New Baskerville is one of the best transitional/modern serifs and needs to be part of every designer’s repetoire, and for slabs/Egyptians Rockwell deserves the spot more than the mono-spaced typewriter font Courier. It’s hard to quibble over the sans list. Maybe Thesis Sans deserves a look, and Gotham is a nice face, but with any list you can always find others to include.
Another tough day for your server huh Jacob?
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I believe that the Gill Sans family has over-sized periods. Gill Sans Extra Bold for sure. My favorite font, hands down.
What about Goudy Old Style??? If Caslon and Bembo are on here, Goudy Old Style’s gotta be.. it’s a classic!
Thank you all for your comments!
Digital Revolutions, What your preferred serif fonts?
Keetano, What would your list include?
Mike, Your welcome and judging by my stats, a lot of other people were in your position too.
Ric, Thanks for your comments, the fonts are there to last a lifetime!
Zachary, thanks for the movie link, twas great!
Eugene, If we all had the money we would own the fonts or at least some of them.
Vinay, I do not codone piracy.
Jeff, Comic Sans
Mmmm.
Bigalow, oversized period eh?
Adrian, interstate, nice choice… I don’t agree that this is a MUST own list but it sure is a good start and attention getter.
Andrew, I got the list from a book.
Miro, Depends on the quality of the client.
Wisefool9, thanks for your long comment. I acan see where you are coming from on some of the things you brought up. Thanks!
Ryo, Thanks… yeah I use adblock too, never see Google ads anyway. But it does cover server costs.
Jamie, I agree with you there especially as a student. Maybe I should have changed the title.
Ben Whitehouse, Thanks for your font suggestions.
Ed, Nope no scripts here.
John, Licenses are found on the linked pages.
Daniel, Thanks for your contribution,
Jive, Well every font is unique!
Joe, Each to their own.
Yonah, SEO that is all.
Ryan, Thanks for your contribution… not so sure about Rockwell. Gotham is nice though
Regan, Tell me about it! 40,000 visitors in 10 hours! Solid Internet (my hosts) got it sorted out pretty quick though.
Rick, Why is it your favourite font?
Liza, I would have to ask the authors who compiled the list why it was not included. Must have been hard to narrow it down to just 30 out of the thousands of fonts available today.
Thanks again everyone for the comments and to the other 350+ who commented on Digg.
Jacob, I was a little surprised that your commenters did not pick up one error: your Lucida sample is not set in Lucida, but in Excelsior. Not that I mind: I am not a huge fan of some of the Lucida subfamilies.
On your choices themselves, this collection is not a bad mixture. These families are good workhorses.
Favourites for me would be Jean-François Porchez’s Sabon Next (published by Linotype), Plantin and Century Old Style. For egyptians, Century Expanded remains one of my favourites.
Sans serifs: we have an internal Swiss typeface which we tend to use instead of Helvetica, but since it’s not publicly available we can’t realistically count it.
Hey Jacob - cool list. I don’t do a lot of design, but I dabble here and there. Not big on a few of the fonts, but will try using most of the others a bit more. Thanks!
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Aquí podréis hallar otra recopilación http://del.icio.us/yadgana/fonts
Bye
Good selection of fonts..
I agree Digital Revolutions. These sans serif fonts are great however I feel that there are some great Serif Fonts that are missing out, in particular Adobe Jensen / Janson
cool, sans serif is my most favourite font, it’s much better than times new roman or arial!! haha.
i’ve learnt a lot, it’s got me to my special place once more
thanks!
Thanks (:
Awesome List!
Thank you very much for these. You got my bookmark!
These fonts will be very handy for our web developers.
We use Myriad a lot, and this will give us a good page to see more options.
I really enjoyed your list, thanks. I do have to admit though, I hate Courier and don’t feel that it deserves a place on this list. But everyone has their own opinions, right :). I really enjoyed the serif fonts. It’s somtimes so hard to find a nice serif that isn’t Times…
The title of this page (in my browser) is “30 Best Fonts, Downloadable Fonts, Free Fonts, Cool Fonts for Designers,” yet as far as I can tell, all the links go to ITC, who charge for their fonts.
Also, I don’t like most of those fonts. The only ones on that list that I like are Courier, Times, Trajan, and Helvetica. I could not disagree more with Wisefool9, who said that there is no need for Times; if I were the client, I would certainly not let the designer use Minion or Garamond in place of Times. ITC Garamond might be OK because its x-height is more than half its cap-height; regular Garamond is too distorted for me.
Fonts that should be included? Let me check my font folder…A.C.M.E. Explosive is the only decent free comic book font; for money, Whizbang or Comicraft’s Gibbons. Everyone should have a good Souvenir, a good Benguiat, and a good Cooper Black for their retro needs. At least one decent calligraphy font is necessary; the best is RSLaserLondon, an outline version of the old London from the 1980s Macintosh “city fonts.” For simulating computer text, real, actual computer fonts are necessary, like OCR A Extended, November, PC Senior, and one of the many old-style video game fonts like Joystick/Emulator/Arcade. For typewriter fonts, VTCorona and American Typewriter. And here’s one that just recently came up in a project: ModeSeven. A friend of mine needed a font to make a video he was editing look like someone was changing channels on a TV, and he turned to me for advice. I used to have the right font, but after racking my brains I couldn’t think of its name, so I asked the LiveJournal community “fontaddicts,” and someone gave me the name. See the result here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvn6kvVLbjc
(Edited to turn notification of followup comments on and replace HTML directed quotes with copied-and-pasted directed quotes. If post appears twice, please delete first version.)
Jack Yuan, good pointing out, I will have to fix that up. Please note I did not make the choices it was the authors of the book from where I got the source.
Chad, your welcome.
Christian, Thanks for the link up
Josh, Thanks.
Rachael, Everyone is entitled to their own opinion
Luke, just for clarification ’sans-serif’ is not a font, it is a decription of how to classify a typeface.
Sesebian, Your welcome
Lukas, Your welcome, may your web developers have success.
Katibob, it seems by looking at who has clicked which fonts the serif fonts were more popular.
Felicity, yes the title is that, more for SEO purposes however some of the fonts are free but make sure you check on the licensing. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Thanks for your contribution with the other font styles, conv, some great ones in there. I think you chose the right font for the tv channel. You sound like a font addict yourself
Hope you stick around, I value your contribution!
Good stuff
OH! And you totally forgot Century Gothic, maybe as a replacement for Din.
I’ll make two quick points here. First, I found this page through etc. (http://www.fortysomething.ca/mt/etc/archives/007242.php), and not Digg. I seriously believe no self-respecting blogger should ‘try’ to land on Digg. That’s the same way Dvorak writes technically and logically incorrect articles to ruffle up feathers, but get tremendous page views for PC World. If your posts are good, people will come, and this is the second time I’ve bumped through here … so yes, your posts are good.
That cleared up, I would really suggest picking fonts (even though I know you didn’t pick these) which look good anti-aliased as well as aliased. The reason for that is different OSs handle aliasing in different ways. XP is terrible as kerning with anti-aliased turned on, while Vista is slightly better. You can’t turn it off in OS X at all. ‘Verdana’, ‘Georgia’ are industry standards and hence favourites of web designers. Microsoft added ‘Cambria’ which is also a font I love. I believe ‘Consolas’ (a rather inferior but manageable port of ‘Monaco’ of OS X) is the future of monospace fonts because it actually looks beautiful (something monospace fonts usually don’t).
All that said, I loved ‘Clarendon’, ‘Stempel Schneidler’ and who doesn’t love ‘Helvetica’
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Nice collection there, as a writer I have a great familiarity with Courier (especially Dark Courier). On the whole though, I definitely prefer the sans-serif fonts.
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Hey man, this is a great mix of goodie good fonts.
You might wanna add Kozuka which is a superb font imo. URW Gothic(the whole set) is also very nice.
Keep it up!
Good post. I like how you’ve illustrated each font - it makes it easy to see the differences between the fonts.
Thanks for the tips!
It helped me alot.
I’m very flattered that you have included my design, Lucida, in your list! Thank you! One problem: the font that you show in the image is not Lucida.
Here’s a site that allows you to choose from many different fonts to generate graphics. Good for trying out different fonts with different effects…http://www.smashupgrahpics.com
Interesting list. Have you ever created your own font?
My favorite is Bookman Old Style. Have you ever seen one similar to “Decorative Penmanship” (Cocoa Cola)?
Hi Lee, not yet but I look forward to it… I am currently studying typography so will get around to it! Ah bookman old style, I was just working with that today in typography class. No I haven’t seen something similar… have you?
It seems kind of pointless to say, “30 typefaces that all designers MUST own,” and then only include system fonts. Should have been called “30 typefaces all typesetters should own.” I don’t think Myriad or Courier should be on this list.
Cale,
The majority of that list is not system fonts and if they are I would like to know what system 
Mryriad is a great font I believe… each font has its own purpose.
Each is entitled to their own opinion
I do agree that everyone is entitled to there own opinion. I also believe that this list could have been better. Some of the fonts are so similar to one another, that I couldn’t really see a “must have” reason to purchase these fonts. If a font family runs you (generously) $100 per. you would be looking at a $3,000 purchase. If this guide is for entry level designers or non-designers, I would hate to send them in the wrong direction for such a large amount of money. All and all you could just change the title to “30 Tried and True Fonts.”
Great article here. Some good advice on which fonts to use for which styles of writing. I’m starting up a blog either today or tomorrow, this is going to be very useful. Awesome!
Helvetica should not be on the list.
Ha! The typeface so revered they made a movie about it shouldn’t be on the list?
Care to give a reason?
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Any suggestions on where to find how to purchase newer fonts for little or no fee? My budget is like….0.
kristarella: Because it’s too common - it’s used too much. Helvetica is about as exciting as gray asphalt, with the glow of a cheep convenience store. It should be banned, just like the incredibly ugly looking Comic Sans MS.
The reason fonts like Helvetica and Times get used so much is because they’re so perfect. There’s nothing wrong with using a font that’s been used a million times before if it’s the perfect font. There /is/ something wrong with using a funny-looking font just because it’s new or rarely used.
Comic Sans gets a bad rap, but it’s just used in the wrong places. Used correctly it’s a beautiful font.
Kristine - dafont.com or Divide by zero are alright for free font, but remember that most of them have limited weights and styles (maybe no bold or italic) they might have characters missing (very unlikely to have a full character set with degree symbols and all that) and the creators probably didn’t spend hours checking all the kerning possibilities. Typefaces are expensive because they’re damn hard to make. That said, I’ve got a fair few of the free ones, they’re good for the occasional novelty.
Alexander - you’re entitled to those feelings and thanks for sharing. I’m inclined to agree with Felicity that it’s a well done typeface that deserves to be used… not sure about the merits of Comic Sans though. It has been used and abused and I cringe when I see it.
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Cale that is very true however do you see someone actually going out and buying every one of these fonts?
Nick - Glad to be of help.
Alexander - So do you believe it shouldn’t be on the list as it its too boring even though it is the most popular typeface ever to be made? Felicity had it summed up quite well. Thanks Felicity to getting here before me
Kristine - Kristarella summed it up very well. Thanks for that Kristarella.
great list. i didn’t know most of them before.
Great post, thank you for taking the time to assemble it.
I guess your first commenter “Sumesh” was wrong, 3006 Diggs, way to go!
This is a great site, I work for an IT Help Desk. This was a huge help when suggesting fonts to users. You get dugg for this article, but I dont mean to nit pick, there are a few spelling errors throughout the article. Nothing to big its just because of my teachers when I was in school. Making us spell check everything we ever did on the computer. Like i said digg worthy article. Nice work.
Hi Wh33zy,
No worries