Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Typefaces: Ziggurat, Archer, Gotham

Designers who use our fonts have been sharing their work on our Facebook page, much to the delight of both H&FJ’s designers and our followers online. Some recent lovelies, clockwise from top left: Christopher Simmons designed this cheerful festival poster using Ziggurat, Leviathan, and a little Hoefler Text; a corporate identity that uses Archer (and a clever emboss) by Mike Kasperski; Gotham in a terrific typographic abecedarium by Paul van Brunschot and his students; a lovely collection of journals by Jodi Storozenko, featuring Archer in a moment of quiet repose; and a bit of Gotham in Anna Farkas’ exhibition identity for The renaissance of letters. Feel free to share your own creations: more then 6,500 other designers are tuned in. —JH

Typeface: Knockout

When we designed the Knockout type family, which celebrates the exuberance of nineteenth century wood type, we wondered: what designer would knowingly use the fonts to recall a world of quack medical cures and traveling vaudevillians? The answer, as it so often turns out to be, is “smart aleck Canadian advertising agencies.” Behold the truly excellent Grip Limited, who have created a typographic tour-de-force in Knockout (and a little Archer) that really repays scrolling in all directions. I especially like the end of the second column. —JH

Every font shown on this site is accompanied by a set of suggested pairings. These are all personal selections (would that they could be automated!) and we're often asked about our methodology for deciding what fonts go together. The truth is that these are intuitive choices: since we design all the fonts ourselves, we're intimately familiar with their visual, functional, cultural and historical qualities, and just have a general sense of "what goes." And yet there are always surprises: I'd never have guessed that the geometric sans serif Gotham had any affinity for the humanist sans Whitney, nor that Vitesse and Archer — two slabs serifs with dramatically different personalities — could get along.

Lately I've been wondering if it might be possible to abstract from these examples some generalities about font pairings, and have come up with a couple of thoughts. Curiously, everything seems to revolve around a single idea about how fonts relate: you’ll find the whole story below. —JH

Ask H&FJ: Mixing Fonts

A friend who teaches typography on the undergraduate level recently asked an unexpected favor: “can my students browse the e-mails H&FJ sends out?” Apparently he’s in the habit of circulating printouts with his students, when they raise questions that we’ve recently discussed with our readers — how to choose fonts for information-heavy projects like annual reports being an especially hot topic, though he also encourages his students to dig deeply in the character sets of their fonts, and to look for value when building their own font libraries. So posted herewith is last month’s e-mail, at the bottom of which you’ll find a link to the previous issue. And if you’d like to get next month’s, we encourage you to...

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