In selecting typefaces, if you’re not a professional typographer, a good practice is to stick with one font family (e.g., Univers, Helvetica) throughout a document.
Our company has often used the combination of New Century for body text and Franklin Gothic for headlines. It turns out that, in a way, these fonts also come from the same family. The original Century was designed by Linn Boyd Benton for The Century Magazine in 1894. His son, Morris Fuller Benton, designed Franklin Gothic. The prolific Morris also made the Century family fuller with Century Schoolbook, New Century, and other variations that remain popular.
Attractive font couples
Not being any sort of typographer myself, I couldn’t name another pair of fonts from different font families that complement each other notably well. But the designer Daniel Will-Harris has developed a list of fonts he likes to pair up. His list is oriented to fonts for printing.
Fonts for computer displays
Computer displays require fonts that look clear at low resolution. Will-Harris also recounts an interesting conversation about screen fonts with typographic luminary Charles Bigelow, co-designer (with Kris Holmes), of the Lucida family. Here are some of his recommendations:
- Verdana is a font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. It is among the best choices for text type on screen. It’s kinda outsize, though.
- Georgia is a serif font designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter. Notice the numerals — 1234567890. When numerals don’t all line up on the baseline, they’re oldstyle numerals, good for invitations, novels, and mailboxes, but not necessarily for tabular display.
- Rockwell is a slab serif or “Egyptian” font, so-called, because it was used to signal troop movements in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
- Arial is a remarkably clean and legible font, which some disparage for its lack of stylishness. We like it.
- Lucida Sans boasts true Italics, meaning that the Italic characters are individually designed. In many other fonts, the italics are nothing but roman characters slanted to the right.
No serif font looks really good in body copy on the screen, says Bigelow, because, at low resolution in small sizes, the number of pixels it takes to form a serif makes up too great a proportion of the whole. In other words, they don’t look the way they’re supposed to, no matter what.
I had assumed all the Lucida fonts supplied with PCs were suitable for screen use. Not so, says Bigelow, who singles out his own Lucida Bright as a particularly dim choice for on-screen display.
A good choice for text editors
Speaking of Lucida, if you use a text editor for scripting, you might want to try changing from the default screen font to Lucida Console.
Here is Courier New, the default for some text editors I’ve used, at 11pt.
Here is 11pt Lucida Console. 