Choosing & Combining Type

Carl Shank • March 29, 2021

How To Choose the Right Type for the Right Job

In his masterful book about typography, Robert Bringhurst wisely says — "The best type for a book about bicycle racing will be, first of all, an inherently good type. Second, it will be a good type for books, which is to say, a good type for comfortable long-distance reading. Third, it will be a type sympathetic to the theme. It will probably be lean, strong and swift; perhaps it will also be Italian. But it is unlikely to be carrying excess ornament or freight, and unlikely to be indulging in a masquerade." (The Elements of Typographic Style, 91). Jan White echoes this sentiment about choosing type in How To Spec Type — "There is no such thing as 'right' or 'correct' use of type. There is only vivid and eloquent effectiveness, or numbing and misleading ineffectiveness." (10) Consequently, a math textbook will use a different typeface than a slogan on a can of soda or a bottle of wine.


White suggest the following questions for the would-be use of a typeface in any context — [1] Does the way the type is handled in a specific circumstance fulfill its purpose? [2] Is it doing the job efficiently? [3] Is the message coming through clearly and vividly? is the message jumping off the page into the reader's mind crispy and memorably? (10) He goes on to say that "good typography is transparent, like blister-packaging — exposing the content inside and letting it speak for itself." He agrees with Bringhurst about the use of type ornaments — "too often typography is used like gift wrapping, in the hope that cosmetic prettification will make the package seem more desirable." (10) So then, "good typography links the verbal with the visual to produce arresting results. Good typography clarifies. It articulates. It elucidates. It expresses meaning." (11) Many would-be editors and writers and office personnel try too hard when it comes to setting type. With the thousands of possible typefaces that are on the market today, produced by would-be typographers, playing with digital type producing programs, many people can get overwhelmed and confused and frustrated by what typeface to use. So, here's some suggestions.


Be careful of a poorly designed typeface. Such a font is missing what should constitute a font family — regular or book, italic, bold, bold italic, ligatures, small caps, text figures, diacritics and important analphabetics. If you don't know what these are, and are content with the standard regular, italic, bold and bold italic then use them in an ordinary way, not trying to be cute or extravagant with them. An example would be Times New Roman —

This is a standard Times Roman.

This is a standard Times Roman Italic.

This is a standard Times Bold.

This is a standard Times Bold Italic.


Even here, "Boldface romans, however, are a nineteenth-century invention. Bold Italic is even more recent, and it is hard to find a successful version designed before 1950. Bold romans and italics have been added retroactively to many earlier faces, but they are often simply parodies of the original designs." (Bringhurst, 99) He would suggest avoiding Garamond and Baskerville, both popular faces available on many systems. Instead, use Robert Slimbach's Utopia font family (See sample below. Note especially the bold small "g" in the Times Roman as contrasted with the small "g" in Utopia.)


Use font variations within the font family. A well-designed font has a number of weights from which to choose for optimum use. So, the font Utopia has Utopia Caption, Regular, Subhead, Display, and the Semibold similar instances as well as the Bold instances. A Utopia Black face is also included. Such variations allow visual interest and adaptability. Here are the weights of the web font Alegreya —

Alegreya Normal

Alegreya Medium

Alegreya Bold

Alegreya Bolder

Alegreya Boldest


Use contrasting sans serif headliners with serif text fonts. But be careful to do some well-defined matching here. Sans serif ("without feet") fonts need to have a similar inner structure to the serif text face used. Thus, Formata Bold in small amounts goes with many text fonts —

Formata Bold with Minion OR with Georgia OR with even Times Roman.


All of this may seem tedious and too time consuming with which to bother. After all, most people do not look at type the way a trained typographer would. But there are obvious overused and overdone font combinations that not only do not please the eye but are simply atrocious. A little care here can mean a great deal to a pleasing report, book or paper.

Successful Layout & Design

Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble?

By Carl Shank • February 12, 2026
Free Fonts: A Deal or Trouble? The latest Google estimate of available fonts is over 300,000 and counting. Other estimates have catalogued over 550,000 fonts. There are over 36,000 font families, over 4,000 type designers and over 2,700 professional font foundries, not counting smaller font entrepreneurs like CARE Typography, which provides restored fonts from yesteryear. (Quora source https://www.quora.com/How-many-fonts-are-there-in-existence-Does-any-group-attempt-to-keep-a-record-of-all-the-fonts-that-exist ) There are commercial fonts from sources like Adobe and MyFonts (Monotype) which require payment for their use in various platforms. Both provide a subscription service, which usually requires a substantial monthly or yearly fee to download and use their fonts. When I began using Apple Macintoshes in the 1980s, font manufacturers like Adobe and Monotype would “sell” the right to use a number of their fonts for thousands of dollars. And, by the way, you never really “own” the font. You have paid only for the use of the font for a specific purpose or machine. Moreover, the price varies for print use, or web use, or a digital ad use. Even today, the font Trinité Titling by Bram de Does, used in a number of Bibles and biblical studies, costs over $4,000 for the use on a single computer and much more for a number of computer users. Individual users of such fonts are mostly priced out of their budget. Why the seemingly extravagant cost? We had a valve on one of our household plumbing lines go bad. I called the plumber, and he replaced the valve — at a cost of several hundred dollars, while the valve itself cost only a few dollars. Was that fair? Yes, because I was paying for the time and training and effort going into replacing that valve in my house. The same holds true for professional font designers. They spend hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hours in font development. We are paying for their livelihood. Font licenses cover four basic parameters around font usage — “The What: The weight and style of the typeface; The Where: Literally where you’ll use the font – a website, digital ad, or in print; The Who: The number times a font can be installed on a computer (aka the number of people who can use it); The How many: For example, web font licenses describe the number of allotted page views, and app and digital marketing licenses set similar parameters.” (Monotype Report) Companies like Monotype are rarely concerning with an individual using a font for a home, individualized project, but rather an entire design company or printer using that font for commercial gain and advertising dollars. There are fonts available “for personal use only,” prohibiting their use for commercial or money-making projects. There are what have been called “shareware” fonts, fonts with a minimal cost which require attribution of the type designer or provider on projects. Most fonts provide a EULA, or font license, which outlines and determines the legal restrictions and ramifications for their use. What about free fonts? Monotype warns against using unlicensed or what are called “free” fonts for several valid reasons, but, in my opinion, this is an obvious ploy to get the user to buy or subscribe to their font services. One Monotype report cites six issues associated with what are deemed “free” fonts. Free fonts may pop up in similar ads or designs to industry competition, perhaps prompting a lawsuit or cease-and-desist actions. Free fonts often have the inability to scale, add special characters, or even different alphabets. Free fonts have limited creative scope. They may be saddled with malware or software viruses. Poor font design can be a problem with such fonts. A sixth problem with so-called free fonts is that they can be actually “pirated” fonts, copied from legitimately designed fonts. “Aside from branding issues, free fonts also suffer from a whole host of performance issues. Fonts are software files that interact with applications and the operating system on which it’s installed; without the guidance of a skilled font engineer, rendering issues may arise from crashing glyphs, or a lack of proper kerning (the space between glyphs) text in certain scenarios. A free font downloaded from a random website might not support a broad range of languages and or complex scripts (e.g., Japanese or Arabic), or basic diatrics to cover commonly used Latin languages.” (Monotype Report) Monotype maintains that free fonts won’t give a company the individual style it deserves to help it stand out in the marketplace. They also point to the legal ramifications involved with font licensing, not a glamorous subject but one in which company attorneys are hired to examine for possible litigation. Types of Free Fonts There are four sources of free fonts — Open Source fonts with an SIL Open Font License (SEE https://openfontlicense.org ); OS fonts, fonts that come with your operating system and hardware; Subscription add-on fonts that come as an add-on to a subscription service; and, advertised free fonts by independent font designers, such as CARE Typography. Many or most of such free fonts come from freeware, shareware, public domain or demo fonts downloaded or reconstructed from an archive or library, like Internet Archive. Companies such as Website Planet offer free “commercial” fonts, fonts that can be used in business and corporate applications. See https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/best-free-fonts/. Several cautions, however, are still in order here. First, a font that “looks like” a standard, business font is not the same thing as its “older brother.” An example is Website Planet’s Playfair Display font, both a variable and static font designed by Claus Eggers Sørensen licensed under the SIL Open Font License agreement. Yet, this font looks a lot like the standard Bodoni font, created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1767 and revived by Morris Fuller Benton in 1911 under Linotype’s commercial license.

More On The Greek Font

By Carl Shank • December 23, 2025
More on the Greek font. In a previous post ( It's Greek To Me! March 18, 2023) we noted that Cursive Greek type appeared as a chancery script by Francesco Griffo in 1502 and lasted two hundred years. Robert Bringhurst notes that "chancery Greeks were cut by many artists from Garamond to Cason, but Neoclassical and Romantic designers . . . all returned to simpler cursive forms . . . in the English speaking world the cursive Greek most often seen is the one designed in 1806 by Richard Porson." This face has been the "standard Greek face for the Oxford Classical Texts for over a century." ( Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley & Marks, Version 3.1, 2005 , pp. 274, 278) In fact, asking Google for the best Greek face to use, it points us to Porson Greek. Porson is a beautiful Unicode Font for Greek. It's not stiff, like many of the cleaner fonts, which are usually san serif. It is bold and easy to read and seems to more closely match the orthography in newer textbooks. (Jan 8, 2004) 
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