If you spend any time at all working with type, sooner or later someone will ask you “What is your favourite font?”

That’s an impossible question to answer, and it’s one of the reasons why there are so many different typefaces, or fonts. I have 12,732 fonts on my computer, organised by Extensis Suitcase Fusion, and of course I don’t use ten different ones a day. Different strokes for different folks.

I use Mosquito Alt for fotoLibra, I tend to use Profile for spreadsheets and computer text, Bulmer for printed text and Trump Mediaeval for printed correspondence. Other Trumps are available.

That doesn’t mean to say these are necessarily my all-time favourite fonts. They’re the ones I find most fit for purpose, I have them available and I like them.

Instead of naming one favourite font, here are my hundred best fonts — the hundred fonts that I use most often. I’ve listed them in the order in which they appear in my (now sadly out of print) Encyclopaedia of Fonts (ISBN 1-84403-206-X), which is structured by classification and date — Uncial, Blackletter, Serif, Lineal, Script, Display — together with country of origin, designer and date where known and anything else which strikes me as brief and interesting.

Tell me what you agree with. Tell me what you disagree with. And please share this!

I’d love to read your comments.

Click on the image to enlarge.

UNCIAL
American Uncial: Austrian, designed by Victor Hammer, 1953. Taken over by Ireland as their national typeface. Truly multinational.

BLACKLETTER
Fette Fraktur: German, designed by Johannes Wagner, 1875. Nobody believes that the Nazis vigorously tried to abolish blackletter, but they did.
Old English: British, designed by Monotype, 1935. Warm and comfortable. Shows how different Britain and Germany are.

SERIF: VENETIAN
Golden Type: British, designed by William Morris, 1890. Elite and exclusive, for a private press.
Clearface: American, designed by Morris Fuller Benton, 1907. Every American printer in the early C20 had to have fonts and fonts of this typeface.
Centaur: American, designed by Bruce Rogers, 1914. One of the most elegant cuttings of the Venetian style.
Vendôme: French, designed by François Ganeau, 1952. Typically French. Elegant, idiosyncratic and slightly unstable.

Next: Serif Old Style

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