Font picker from website trial#

So I created my own list of 5 fonts that I use most often. I came to the same conclusion as Massimo and many other designers - I don’t need a huge range of fonts of questionable quality to choose from, I only need a few high quality ones. Being self-taught had a huge role in how long it took me to grasp that it’s not the quantity of fonts that matters, it’s the quality.

Font picker from website trial#

I learned that by trial and error through my career. These are just the basics, but just using these, we can create lots of original designs and variety with a single font.

Size, contrast, placement, background and foreground colours, and how it’s combined with other fonts in a design. It’s not just about which font we choose, but also how we use it. Massimo Vignelli’s example of using Helvetica from above illustrates this. But the question here is - do we really need all these fonts? And should we really just forget about the web safe fonts which we often consider as “boring?” My own 5 fontsĪn inexperienced designer thinks that they need a vast amount of fonts to choose from, an experienced one knows that they can use one font in many different ways. It’s now completely common for a designer to always pick a different font for each project. And as soon as they could start to experiment with different fonts, they never looked back to the tried and tested heavyweights from the past. They were the two obvious choices as web safe fonts, as well as Arial which is a copy of Helvetica. Times New Roman and Helvetica fell out of favour with designers soon after the proliferation of web fonts in the early 2000s.

Massimo Vignelli’s 5 fonts which he built his rich career on: Futura, Times New Roman, Helvetica, Bodoni, Century.