When designing a creative piece of marketing material for a business, a graphic designer has to be able to pair the right fonts with the design to deliver the message as clearly as possible. However, a graphic designer has thousands of different fonts they can choose from. So how do they know what fonts to use when there are so many to choose from? Well, there are some particular fonts that are designed for certain types of projects and some that shouldn’t be used in others. For instance if you were designing a logo for a law firm you would want to use a font that’s strong, bold, and easy to read like “Trajan Pro”. And if you were designing a flyer for a kids charity event you can use more playful fonts that are more whimsical, and give off a cheerful message like “Comic Sans”.
Although there are so many fonts to choose from, here is a list of the top most used fonts by graphic designers featured in JustCreative.com.
1. Helvetica
Without a doubt, Helvetica is the most heavily used font by professionals and also by the not so professional in graphic design. Although some praise the font, many believe that it is spaced too tightly.
2. Trajan Pro
Trajan finds its way into many Hollywood movie posters and anything remotely to do with religion, law, marriage, class or the past. It is strong and sharp and often used in corporate designs.
3. Garamond
Although there are many versions of Garamond, the most used version today is the Adobe Garamond version which was released in 1989. Garamond is a great font for magazines, textbooks, websites and long bodies of text and was recently named the second best font (after Helvetica) by a German publication.
4. Futura
Futura is a font that comes up often in large displays, logos, corporate typefaces and in books where small text is needed. It is based on geometric shapes such as near-perfect circles, triangles and squares.
5. Bodoni
Bodoni is a great font for headlines, decorative text and logos. Bodoni has a narrow underlying structure with flat, unbracketed serifs.
6. Bickham Script Pro
Used mainly for formal occasions, Bickham Script Pro is a font which does the job well… Cameron Moll even recommended it in his article “Typefaces no one will get fired for using.” The ‘not-so-trained’ designer usually vouches for Vivaldi instead which is one of America’s most hated fonts.
7. Frutiger
The Frutiger font family is neither strictly geometric nor humanistic in construction; its forms are designed so that each individual character is quickly and easily recognized.