You Only Need 10 Fonts

T

Tony Hardy

Guest
Yesterday, Jordan suggested in another typography thread that "You only ever need 10 fonts as a designer". To me, that seems logical. Maybe 10 font families, so you have weight variations, but completely logical.
This morning, I read this article on Creative Bloq; http://www.creativebloq.com/typography/fonts-for-designers-2131830 Which suggests that designers should own these 20 fonts, if nothing else.
Do you find yourself using more than 10 fonts? Do you really need to? If you had to narrow your Font Book down to only 10 fonts, what would they be?
I'm still having a think about mine, but I'll get back to you!
 
Is this being applied to web development also, or just print?
IMO it could be 1 - 100's of fonts for web, totally depending on the brief I guess. With @font-face and other services becoming available we have any of them at our finger tips. We just need to consider readability & Accessibility of the font I guess.
 
I think it was applied to anything. That idea that you could get by using only 10 fonts, forever. It's a fairly sane notion. I do often find myself reverting to the same fonts. That could be lack of imagination on my part?
 
[font="'comic sans ms'"]10.....blasphemy, you only need 1... comic sans, the go to font for ALL talented designers[/font] :lol:
 
I think there's always going to be that powerhouse core of fonts but we're always going to need other ones at some point depending on the task at hand.
 
Levi said:
[font="'comic sans ms'"]10.....blasphemy, you only need 1... comic sans, the go to font for ALL talented designers[/font] :lol:
I might have to look at uninstalling Comic Sans on the forum ;)
 
Tony Hardy said:
I might have to look at uninstalling Comic Sans on the forum ;)
can we get papyrus instead then... thats a close second to the quality of comic sans :)
 
Levi said:
can we get papyrus instead then... thats a close second to the quality of comic sans :)
Or I could ban you for even suggesting Papyrus? ;)
 
Bleeding Cowboys ftw! ;)

Seriously though it's an interesting point. I probably have less than 10 "go to" fonts, but there's always that project that calls for something a little funky.
 
how could I forget bleeding cowboys... so thats 3 of our 10... what are the other 7 then :)
 
It may be controversial here to mention google fonts project. What do people think of this? On my Wordpress sites I use G Font plugin, it's really useful for importing these fonts into a blog/content-that's if you're a Wordpress user of course
 
I [font="'comic sans ms'"]don't[/font] use [font="'courier new'"]that[/font] [font="'times new roman'"]many[/font] fonts at [font="'lucida sans unicode'"]all.[/font]
 
It'd probably be more accurate to say that there's a small pool of fonts for any given Design problem. I don't know if I'd want to use the same 10 fonts for Logo work as I would something Narrative focused such as comics or short stories. Definitely different kinds fonts for Animation Vs Poster design. A different toolkit for a different, but similar, project.
 
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