Which font to use

Most serifs, on the other hand, do have a true italic style, with distinctive letter forms and more compact spacing. The standard unit for measuring type size is the point. For body text in academic papers, type sizes below 10 point are usually too small to read easily, while type sizes above 12 point tend to look oversized and bulky. So keep the text of your paper between 10 and 12 point. Some teachers may require you to set your whole text at 12 point. Yet virtually every book, magazine, or newspaper ever printed for visually unimpaired grown-ups sets its body type smaller than 12 point.

Newspapers use even smaller type sizes. The New York Times , for example, sets its body text in a perfectly legible 8.

So with proper spacing and margins, type sizes of 11 or 10 point can be quite comfortable to read. I usually ask my students to use Century Schoolbook or Palatino for their papers. If your teacher requires you to submit your papers in a particular font, do so.

Unless they require you to use Arial , in which case drop the class. One thing to consider when choosing a font is how you submit your essay. When you submit a hard copy or a PDF, your reader will see the text in whatever typeface you use. So if you submit the paper electronically, be sure to use a font your instructor has.

What follows is a list of some widely available, highly legible serif fonts well-suited for academic papers. Microsoft Word comes with lots of fonts of varying quality. If your teacher asks you to submit your paper in Word format, you can safely assume they have Word and all the fonts that go with it. Supreme Court Rule The most common criticism of Helvetica is that it lacks character.

The runner up on our list is also a sans serif font. However, it has more character than Helvetica. The set-width is tighter, and the letter shapes are rounder and more creative. Microsoft designed Calibri, and it's now the default font in Microsoft Office.

Our next example is another classic sans serif font. Sans serif fonts are in fashion today because they reflect the mood of our post-modern era. Futura is the best-known geometric font in use today. Its characters are all drawn from the circle, the square or the triangle.

If your customer wants readers to see it as ultramodern or futuristic, this is the accepted choice to make. Garamond is the first serif font on our list. Garamond is best known as a typeface for book publishing. You can use it whenever you want to convey a sense of classical taste and refinement. The best-known serif font in the world has dipped just below Garamond in popularity recently. The Times of London commissioned the font in It used the typeface for forty years.

Readers will always associate it with journalism and publishers use it for books and general printing every day. Its reputation makes it the perfect font for brands who want to convey a solid, reliable image. We're often impressed by the skill with which wine stewards in fine restaurants match the perfect wines to our meal choices.

There's a trade secret behind that skill. Wine stewards have a limited menu to support and a limited inventory in their cellar. They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer.

Many slab serifs seem to express an urban character such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin , but when applied in a different context especially Clarendon they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast. The best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to each other, they look good together because they match correspondence.

On the other hand, if we put a dime next to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere in Central Europe, this also looks interesting because of the contrast between the two — they look sufficiently different. This creates an uneasy visual relationship because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and wondering distracts us from simply viewing.

We can start by avoiding two different faces from within one of the five categories that we listed above all together — two geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not exactly alike, these two are also not sufficiently different and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-nor-there place.

If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with Helvetica, much better if we use something like Bembo, a classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years apart in terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have enough contrast to comfortably share a page:.

But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This shared common aspect can be visual similar x-height or stroke weight or it can be chronological.

Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working well together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

And my Thai restaurant menu! And my Christmas cards! What of our Halloween flares? And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny fonts. Photo credit: Betsssssy. But if we get carried away and slather Betsey entirely in pink, she might wind up looking something like this:. Photo credit: Phillip Leroyer. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent and — worse yet — our design becomes very hard to read.