I've seen a lot of people using the wrong fonts for the wrong applications a lot. Somewhere in my time, I started to pay close attention to the correct use of fonts and general typesetting of printed material, as well as webpages, etc.

I'm not a designer, lector, or typesetter, but I have my own library of “essential fonts” by now, that I'd like to share.

The fonts discussed here, are used quite extensively, and are considered the de-facto standard, mostly.

Hunting some fonts down, can be quite tedious. Most of them can be bought from foundries, but when you don't want to pay money. You're not gonna find them easily.

People seem to dislike serif fonts. I believe, it is due to the overuse of Times New Roman starting from the early 90's till well into the 2000's.

Serif fonts aren't used on websites very often, which is a shame in my opinion. The serif increase legibility when reading quickly even on monitors, provided the font is optimized for monitor use! I suggest using serif fonts on websites like Wikipedia, and wherever larges portions of text have to be read.

(Adobe Garamond Pro) A lot of books are typeset in it. Long text in a calm, book-like fashion look great in it.

Great for printing a single piece of paper, a note or a letter. Not for texts spanning several hundred pages, etc. Works quite good on displays, too.

Classic book font. Often used for fantasy themed material. Good for organic headlines, as well.

One of the standard magazine fonts. Fits the “longer than a letter, shorter than a book” requirement. Great for Essays, etc.

Clean and calm font, often used for magazines, newspapers, and books as well.

Another typical newspaper font. I've never seen it in books, though.

Nice font for attention-drawing headlines, Typesetting notes in serif fonts? That's the font for the job.

It seems “sans-serif” is equivalent to “Arial” for most people. Arial has seen a lot of overuse in the last two decades, just like Times New Roman for serif fonts.

Sans-Serif fonts are most often seen on websites and a lot of letters are typeset in sans-serif fonts as well. The more attention drawing font genus, is best used for posts, signs, labels, and things of that kind.

The more organic fonts are better suited for printing, and look less “strict”.

Open, calm, yet attention drawing. Perfect for signs, notes, etc.

A nice organic Sans-Serif font great for printing letters. Not for longer texts, though.

Very open font, great for display use in bold. Fits the “The word is the signal” requirement.

Very subtle and calm font. Often seen on gravestones. Not attention drawing, yet very timeless and easy to read.

More compact than Helvetica Neue. Though it's quite similar, it's less open and not as easy and quick to read as Helevtica.

Very classical sans-serif font. widely used from the 60's on till now, especially in the US.

A very classical sans-serif font. Very good for reading longer text. Comprises very good gray area. Very wide use in the first half of 20th century in Europe.

Note: The term “grotesque” in the context of typography, is basically an antiquated form of saying sans-serif. It has nothing to do with grotesque like in art or architecture.

They look pretty post-modern to me, and I'm not a big fan of those fonts. Most prominently used for headlines on billboard advertizing and women magazines.

Some people describe the font as “feminine”, I just don't like the narrowness, etc.

Standard Modern font. The LT cut is quite heavy, almost of surreal proportions. Women magazines like to use it on headlines. Seldom used anywhere else, other than advertizing, etc.

Slightly aged font of LaTeX. Great for math mode, but not that widely used as body font.

Note: OK, this seems to confuse people. “Modern” refers to the geometry of those fonts. They're not modern as in “new”. When a font is “modern” it usually has strong vertical lines and very thin horizontal lines. It almost looks like the font is a series of columns, since the difference between thin and strong lines is huge, and since the strong lines are almost exclusively exactly upright.

The iconic “WANTED” poster comes to mind.

The font genus has other uses as well, since it's heavily attention drawing. Pamphlets for rules, etc, things like important notes to be stuck to walls. Slab serifs work great there.

• Rockwell Very attention drawing, yet clean Slab-Serif font. Good for Design use, sometimes used for signs, etc.
• Playbill Slab-Serifs of comical proportions. Pretty much the only use is wild-west themed “WANTED” posts.
• Vera Serif Very subtle slabs. Great for larger text on display, banners, etc.

Often seen in Movies of the 60's and 70's, this font genus was considered futuristic back then. Today, it still makes a great font for logo design. It complements technology, clearness and coolness.

• Eurostile Modern in the idea of the 60's and 70's. Still a great font for signs, labels, etc. Short text are OK as well, especially on websites. Large font size is required, though.
• Microgramma More abstract than Eurostile. Pretty much the only use is signs and labels.
• Klavika Often used in logos. Quite a bit puffy, even in non-bold weights.

Script fonts are ment to mimic handwriting. While the idea is somewhat interesting, it has close to no use, other than in logos or labels.

A Carte in a restaurant may use that for its artistic features in some points, but certainly no text longer than four or five words should be typeset in it.

• Edwardia Script Very decorative initials, quite legible, but annoying when used in longer text. Quite usable as titles, labels, etc.
• Zapfino Except its artistic features, this font is useless. It has a plethora of OTF features, which make it quite interesting to test OTF rendering capabilities in browsers and other GUI software. As text font, though, it is merely usable on things like business cards.

Those fonts don't have much use outside their specific application. They're mostly not really decorative, but are cut to be used for specific applications, like stamps, tiny displays, monochrome panels, whatever.

Font often seen for mathematical equations, etc. Seldom use as body font.

A necessity when programming. Often used for ASCII art. Quite a number of people use monospace fonts for their artistic qualities on logos, headlines, etc. as well.

• Inconsolata Very good programming font. Great for printing listings, etc. Very nice italic features.
• ProFont Very tiny, yet very legible bitmap font. Great for dot-matrix displays, with large pixel distance and low resolution.
• Monaco Very calm font. Not too much for programming (a lot of people use it for programming, though). Great for listings, especially on monitors, but prints nicely as well…
• Terminus My #1 font for programming. Even on high resolution displays, this font looks best with a larger font size. Completely unusable for printing though. Use on Monitors is very limited, as Terminus quickly strains the eyes when reading quickly.
• Vera Mono Very good and open sans-serif monospace font. Great for printing.
• FreeMono Replacement for Courier. The font isn't cut too nicely, but does a good job in mimicking the typewriter appearance.

The fonts I listed above, are the ones I use pretty much on a daily basis. And if not daily, they're in quick reach in my library at any time.

However, when designing, sometimes a certain emotion has to be conveyed with a font. This could be a temporal issue, like using the correct font for something themed in the 40's or 60's. Or themes like socialism, futurism, etc. are all reflected in their respective use of fonts.

Those fonts come with Microsoft, and are partially over used these days. Some of them are new, some of them have been around for ages.

• Cambria The first of Microsofts “new” fonts. Subtle serifs, very clean typefaces. Pretty “gothic”, to use a rather antiquated term.
• Candara Second of Microsofts “new” fonts. Very organic looking sans-serif font, slightly expanded ends. Very large x-height, very open. Certain minimalistic aspects contrast things like oldstyle numerics.
• Constatia The more classical or Garamond-ish font, compared to Cambria, very open yet very sharp and long serifs.
• Consolas monospace font, and the last of the four “new” fonts by Microsoft. Intended for programming. Microsoft takes a new approach at using a sans-serif monospace font, in contrast to courier. As all new Microsoft fonts, this font is very open, has a large x-height and a very slight angle in the italic version. Nice programming font, but only at sizes of 10pt or larger.
• Arial One of the most over used fonts ever. Tries to be Helvetica, but isn't, it's like Helveticas ugly twin or something… Quite closed rounded parts and pretty thick details. Has no real italic version, instead italic is actually oblique.
• Tahoma Larger x-height and more open and circular than Arial. Looks convoluted when printed on paper, but actually quite OK for signs and posts.
• Verdana The “better” Arial. quite calm, with a large x-height, but looks good when printed.
• Times New Roman I'd like to simply say “no comment” here. It is the font of the Times magazine, and it does a good job being that, but seriously, don't print letters in Times New Roman!*
• Georgia A modern serif font, but with interesting details, such as some serifs are dropped, high ascenders and old-style numerics. Looks best on displays, not so great for printing. Average x-height.

This section might as well be part of the above, as most of those fonts are Windows fonts. It's kinda sad that those fonts are overused, since they have their right for existence where used correctly.

• Arial A Helvetica-like font. Overused due to the fact, that it starts with “A”, and was/is the first sans-serif font that appears in Word.
• Tahoma Not actually too much overused, since Arial usually takes the cake. Still easy to spot on printed material - where it doesn't belong.
• Verdana The font that I would suggest, if Helvetica isn't around. Not too much overuse.
• Times New Roman Standard font of Office and that's where everything starts to go downhill. Overused doesn't even describe it.
• Georgia Nice serif font, that would make a nice Times New Roman replacement for longer printed texts. Overused on digital displays, such as eBook readers, etc.
• Comic Sans Over and miss used for signs, posts, sometimes even letters, as well as sometimes on websites as well.
• ITC Garamond Overused in books. Most technical handbooks use ITC Garamond, due to the large x-height. It improves reading from a distance, but slows fluent reading considerably.

I have no idea how I should name this section, hence “other”.

• Kabel A nice geometric font, sometimes used in Logos. Quite often seen on signs and labels from the 50's and 60's.
• Futura Nice modern font from the 40' used to be used heavily in the 30's and 40's for modern applications. Very small x-height and very circular shapes, quite good for representing Bauhaus-Era design, etc.

I though I should mention or comment some of the OSS projects for creating free Unicode fonts, that cover most if not all of the Unicode table.

Now, those project have a noble idea and are generally a good thing, but some of them overshoot their target, or simple take a direction usually leading to nowhere.

However some of them have had very nice results in the past and are generally very good fonts. I've used some of them in this article. I've talked about fonts in this article, that usually cost a lot of money. Now, with those free fonts, it is actually possible to get very nice results. So when über-professionalizm isn't a necessity, like big newspapers, or movie productions, they might serve pretty much the needs of anyone. It's actually quite a relief to have those free fonts available, in case you plan on releasing your own book, or a small volume newspaper.

It is a set of bitmap fonts. I think it's good that it exists, even though it doesn't see much use nowadays. There are a number of raster fonts for all kinds of purposes, but this one's more or less a standard, and it covers a wide range of Unicode.

Those are the fonts with “Free” in their names, like FreeMono, FreeSans, and FreeSerif. The fonts are based on other fonts like Helvetica, or Courier, but usually not done too well. It's good they're there, I think, but it seems like the people managing them, got bored half way through making glyphs for the Unicode table. FreeSerif has the most glyphs, while FreeMono has the fewest, with about one third of the glyphs of FreeSerif. FreeSans has slightly less than half of FreeSerif's glyphs, which makes it dificult to interchange them.

They released a number of fonts under their own version of an Open Font License. The fonts are based on other fonts that aren't free for use, mostly. Charis SIL is based on Bistream Charter, Doulos SIL based on Times New Roman, and Gentium. Now Gentium is a whole other story. Gentium is actually a great typeface, somewhere in the middle between Centaur and Garamond. I like that a lot, it's a great font.

Bitstream Vera is quite OK, based on other fonts like Arial. I don't like the mono spaced fonts. Very modern serif variant. Due to the wide en and em lengths, I don't think it'd be too good to print it. I'd prefer DejaVu any day over this one.

Only the roman variant of that font takes to implement as many glyphs as possible of the Unicode table. It is very, very, old-style, almost with a Celtic tone to it. Huge x-height, which I don't particularly like.

I like DejaVu. It is based on Bitstream Vera, and personally, I think they did everything right, what Bitstream Vera didn't do right. It works perfectly on screens, the sans and sans-serif fonts are quite thin but clear, and the mono has very nice lines, so they don't look cramped, etc. The Unicode coverage is very good, much better than that of Bitstream Vera.

Invented for use on Android phones. Since this font family was invented for small screens, it has a very large x-height and small en and em lengths, as those are more or less required for screens that are vertical. there's people who like to use that font for other purposes, but personally, I think they should stay on small handheld devices, where they belong.

Other than that, I think the fonts is quite ordinary. I was using it as console font for a while on my netbook, but decided I switch back to Terminus and Inconsolata.

It's an unofficial extension of Microsoft Fixedsys, that I don't particularily like. The idea is quite good, though, especially for Windows users, that like to use Fixedsys. I actually tested that font in terminal emulators, and wasn't too thrilled. The font consists of outlines only, that work only at 12pt/16px. At larger or smaller font sizes, the characters look deformed. The font is available at the font's horrible website http://fixedsysexcelsior.com.

It includes the whole CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C and many other related characters. It's a nice font for Kana, etc, the latin letters look a bit condensed for my liking. I Don't have a sample ready. The font website is awful, but right now the only source of information.

Good alternative to Caslon. It's very old-style, but glyphs are quite narrow, and it has a nice x-height.

The project that brought us the excellent Linux Libertine and Linux Biolinum fonts. I don't think I could add much more to what I've written above, just that I think this is a prime example of an open font project, that goes in the correct direction.

In contrast to Linux Libertine, those fonts simply copy Arial (Liberation Sans), Times New Roman (Liberation Serif), and Courier New (Liberation Mono), although there are differences. I don't think this is the correct way of doing it, even though the project adds Unicode coverage. The idea of providing a drop-in replacement for the established fonts is a good idea, but for that, the slight changes, are already too big. The constrains seem a bit like hinderance, and that makes the fonts not work so well, on screens and printed material alike. Liberastika fonts is a fork of Liberation fonts, with improved Cyrillic.

Those are Japanese fonts, with mostly thin and equal line strength in their glyphs. Looks almost like a minimalist artwork you'd see in museums or artsy-fartsy magazines.

This font is “A Unicode Font for Classical and Medieval Studies”. For me, the font looks quite modern, however less extreme, much more sane, and I think it makes a good essay-font. On the other hand, I don't see anything too much special about it. But as this font was based on Cyrillic fonts, with influences from Greek typography, there might be differences there. Has very heavy and very old-style numerals.