3 ms·

A real designer can use just one font his entire career and produce amazing results. See Massimo Vignelli.

eesmith 3y ago
For the uninformed like me, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli says "Vignelli's designs were famous for following a minimal aesthetic and a narrow range of typefaces that Vignelli considered to be perfect in their genre, including Akzidenz-Grotesk, Bodoni, Helvetica, Garamond No. 3 and Century Expanded. ... "Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.""
- daveslash 3y ago
  I'm not a font expert, but I do appreciate good typeface. I view typefaces like shoes - different types for different uses. I have my running shoes, my hiking boots, my beach shoes, my dress shoes, etc... I have my mono-spaced typefaces, my variable-width typefaces, my serif, and my sans serif.
rob74 3y ago
> Vignelli designed the iconic signage for the New York City Subway system during this period, and the 1970s–80s map of the system. If you're Vignelli, you can tell the MTA which font to pick. If you're not him (or someone of equally high standing), you will most likely have to work with a style guide someone else thought out, and use whatever font(s) the style guide says you should use... Plus, that was back in the seventies. Nowadays, every self-respecting company wants to have their own font (even if it's indistinguishable from Hel(l)vetica/Arial/whatever for >99% of people) - https://www.hvdfonts.com/custom-cases https://www.hvdfonts.com/custom-cases
al_borland 3y ago
If not just one, a small handful of maybe 3-5 fonts. The idea that someone needs to scroll through a list of hundreds of fonts every time they have a new project, and pick multiple fonts for every project, seems to mostly be a form of procrastination… or leaning on a font to cover up a weak design.
- RuggedPineapple 3y ago
  This strikes me as similar to the Web Colors that used to be important. They had a selection of a couple dozen colors that were safe to use and would display correctly on basically the entire gamut of systems, browsers and color depths of the time in the 90s, and developers were... highly encouraged... to pick from them.

For the uninformed like me, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Vignelli says "Vignelli's designs were famous for following a minimal aesthetic and a narrow range of typefaces that Vignelli considered to be perfect in their genre, including Akzidenz-Grotesk, Bodoni, Helvetica, Garamond No. 3 and Century Expanded. ... "Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.""

daveslash 3y ago
I'm not a font expert, but I do appreciate good typeface. I view typefaces like shoes - different types for different uses. I have my running shoes, my hiking boots, my beach shoes, my dress shoes, etc... I have my mono-spaced typefaces, my variable-width typefaces, my serif, and my sans serif.

rob74 3y ago

> Vignelli designed the iconic signage for the New York City Subway system during this period, and the 1970s–80s map of the system. If you're Vignelli, you can tell the MTA which font to pick. If you're not him (or someone of equally high standing), you will most likely have to work with a style guide someone else thought out, and use whatever font(s) the style guide says you should use... Plus, that was back in the seventies. Nowadays, every self-respecting company wants to have their own font (even if it's indistinguishable from Hel(l)vetica/Arial/whatever for >99% of people) - https://www.hvdfonts.com/custom-cases https://www.hvdfonts.com/custom-cases

al_borland 3y ago

If not just one, a small handful of maybe 3-5 fonts. The idea that someone needs to scroll through a list of hundreds of fonts every time they have a new project, and pick multiple fonts for every project, seems to mostly be a form of procrastination… or leaning on a font to cover up a weak design.

RuggedPineapple 3y ago
This strikes me as similar to the Web Colors that used to be important. They had a selection of a couple dozen colors that were safe to use and would display correctly on basically the entire gamut of systems, browsers and color depths of the time in the 90s, and developers were... highly encouraged... to pick from them.