I just had someone tell me their favorite font is Comic Sans – yikes, what do I do?
While this list may be a big “DUH” for most advanced designers, I think it will help some of those design students or even non-designers who haven’t had a chance to explore that Font menu (or beyond the Font menu). I’m talking about the people who might be stuck on the M$ Office defaults that they’ve always been told to use. I’m also talking about those junior designers who just haven’t had time to explore beyond “Myriad” (the Adobe Illustrator default) in the font menu. You can usually tell it is a Junior Designer’s work when everything uses Myriad. Trust me, my first portfolio site used a lot of Myriad. It’s a shame, really – Myriad is a nice font.
I have a lot of fonts I like to use in more creative pieces, but there are some standard go-to fonts everyone should try for a serious corporate design piece. Below are fonts that major corporations use all the time because they are timeless and professional. None of these are too obscure and shouldn’t be too hard to come by, many may already be on your computer.
Top 10 For Print:
1. Helvetica Neue
2. Adobe Garamond Pro
3. Gill Sans
4. Futura
5. Century Gothic
5. Clarendon
6. Bodoni
7. Frutiger
9. DIN
10. Dax Condensed
Top 5 for Web:
1. Tahoma
2. Trebuchet MS
3. Verdana
4. Arial
5. Georgia
Honorable Mention: Times New Roman. There’s really nothing wrong with it, I don’t hate TNR. It’s just good to get away from the default sometimes – which is why it was hard to include Arial, but I needed to include it because you can’t really go wrong with Arial or Helvetica.
In short, try to get beyond Myriad when you start designing in Adobe Creative Suite and while there’s nothing wrong with Arial and Times New Roman, thinking beyond these fonts will improve your designs so much. Use Helvetica instead of Arial when you can, and never ever use Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Brush Script. These fonts have been used to death by non-designers everywhere and have no place in a professional design. Heck, even cartoonists shouldn’t use Comic Sans at this point, it’s gotten that overused.
Infographic resumes are a fun way for creative people to stand out and get important points across. Use important statistics like how many rebrands you’ve done, what percentage of website traffic you’ve increased, and other important accomplishments. Career development experts have been telling us to highlight this stuff for years, and now the trend is to visualize it. I’ve put together one of my own, which you can download by clicking the thumbnail to the left.