As I started my journey as a designer, I did find that typography was one of the hardest fundamentals for me to master and get a hand on, and every time I did choose a type - it felt empty to me
I was guilty of having every font under the sun. After a year of design experience, I started to understand this — it is best to master a few typefaces.
Avoid Free Fonts
The key is to avoid free fonts at all costs as in starting stage of a design career, it’s often hard to tell if the font is poorly designed or not. You don’t want to pick a poorly designed font for your client.
If budget is an issue, the only place you go for free fonts is Google Fonts.
Another reason I tell you to avoid them is, that most of them are used everywhere so there is no unique visual differentiation the project may start feeling generic.
Fonts like Lato, Inter, Poppins, etc. are some of the very common ones you can find on the Internet.
- Notion uses Inter, Hell I too use inter on my website — See.
- Slack uses Lato.
- Most newsletter publications prefer Lato for its readability of long-form content.
- Poppins is the most generic font out there used too much that whenever you spot it, you can tell.
- These generic fantastic fonts should only be used for body copy content as they are functional and easy to read — The exception to the rule.
Now, for the juicy stuff that you are waiting for — This list does include free fonts and the exception to the rule fonts that I will use for the body copy in my projects as they are functional and very readable for long-form content.
This list does not feature typefaces in any particular order.
10 Must-Have Typefaces
- Adobe Garamond Pro
- Times New Roman
- Baskerville
- Helvetica Neue
- Bauer Bodoni
- Didot
- Clarendon
- Futura
- Frutiger
- Univers
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