System fonts are the fonts that are built into your computer (as opposed to fonts you buy and install separately). Some are better than others. Three key problems with using system fonts in printed documents:
- They’re all overexposed. Because these fonts are included with the system software, they’re used all the time. Not every typographic project demands novelty, but if yours does, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
- Many are optimized for screen display, not printing. Certain system fonts have been meticulously engineered to be optimally legible on screen (for instance, Georgia, Verdana, and Calibri). But this legibility comes at the cost of subtle design details, which have been filtered out because they don’t reproduce well on screen. These fonts often look clunky on the printed page.
- Many are not very good. This is less of a problem on the Mac. Unfortunately, some of the Windows system fonts are among the most awful on the planet. I don’t want to name names, but my least favorite rhymes with Barial.
That said, I believe in doing the best you can with the tools you’ve got. If your selection is limited to system fonts, use the chart below and choose wisely.
This chart includes all the common Windows and Mac system fonts, plus the Microsoft Office 2007 fonts. (Every system configuration is different, so not all these fonts may be on your computer. If you don’t see it in your font menu, you don’t have it.)
The chart rankings represent a blend of practical and aesthetic considerations, not absolute merit. For instance, Big Caslon is a perfectly nice font, but it’s intended to be used at large sizes and doesn’t have bold or italic variants. Therefore, it’s inapt for a law office.
For on-screen use, including presentations and websites, system fonts in Tiers 1–3 are fine. They’re also suitable for sharing draft documents. But stay away from Tier 4 for any purpose.
Tier 1: Best bets
Baskerville
Bell
Calisto
Century Schoolbook
Franklin Gothic
Garamond
Gill Sans
Goudy Old Style
High Tower Text
Hoefler Text
Optima
Perpetua
Tier 2: Acceptable
Agency
Book Antiqua
Calibri
Californian
Futura
Helvetica
Lucida
Palatino
Times New Roman
Tier 3: Avoid
Bodoni
Cambria
Candara
Cochin
Consolas
Constantia
Corbel
Courier
Didot
Eras
Georgia
Tw Cen
Tier 4: Under no circumstances
American Typewriter
Andale Mono
Apple Chancery
Arial
Bauhaus 93
Berlin Sans
Bernard
Big Caslon
Blackadder
Bradley Hand
Britannic Bold
Broadway
Brush Script
Bookman
Castellar
Centaur
Century Gothic
Chiller
Comic Sans
Cooper Black
Copperplate
Curlz
Geneva
Edwardian Script
Elephant
Engravers
Felix Titling
Footlight
Forte
Freestyle Script
French Script
Gigi
Gloucester
Goudy Stout
Haettenschweiler
Harlow Solid
Harrington
Herculanum
Imprint
Impact
Informal
Jokerman
Juice
Kristen
Kunstler Script
Magneto
Maiandra
Marker Felt
Matura Script
Modern No. 20
Monaco
Monotype Corsiva
Niagara
OCR A
Old English Text
Onyx
Palace Script
Papyrus
Parchment
Plantagenet Cherokee
Playbill
Poor Richard
Pristina
Rage
Ravie
Script
Segoe
Showcard Gothic
Skia
Snap
Stencil
Tahoma
Tempus Sans
Trebuchet
Verdana
Viner Hand
Vivaldi
Vladimir Script
Wide Latin
Zapfino
Did I mention Arial?
And Comic Sans?
But if you must use an OS font for a document to print, what would be your suggestion(s)?
New Century Schoolbook
A typographer recommending *against* using Helvetica? And similarly charging that Helvetica is optimized for screen display?
I’d argue that the over-exposure argument only really applies to gimmicky faces. A typeface with a gimmick relies on its uniqueness. Otherwise there are lots of faces that are used quite a lot because they are classic and well-crafted.
A fair point, but the Helvetica that comes with your operating system is not the Helvetica that graphic designers know and love–it’s a unique digitization of the font, specially designed and engineered for lower-resolution output (300 dpi and below).
Back in the day, I printed letterpress projects using foundry Helvetica and Palatino–yep, lead type–and they are very different from the operating system versions. I also worked on numerous typefaces for use in operating systems, so I can attest to the design compromises that those fonts require.
mmm… there are some very good fonts on windows and mac. Georgia, tahoma, helvetica, cambria…
Hoefler Text supplied with Mac OS (since 7.5) is very good. It has a rich set of characters and variants (ligatures, text ornaments, initial and terminal swashes etc.); in particular genuine small capitals and old-style figures, although not all these characters may be available in all apps. You can see these variations through the very useful Typography palette in TextEdit (available through the Fonts palette).
I’ll give Hoefler Text a pass because I like Jonathan Hoefler.
Speaking of type, it would be cool if your site had a colophon.
[...] I just found Typography for Lawyers and cannot recommend reading it highly enough, whatever your profession. The website is a straight-forward and accessible guide to typographic considerations. And I suppose I can point a friend to this in the future when he or she asks me what font to use for a résumé. Sorry, Charlie, I guess you shouldn’t use Helvetica or Palatino. [...]
You put the kibbosh on the Word 07 fonts (the C-fonts…Calibri, Candara, Constantia, Cambria.) I don’t think these are bad fonts (they aren’t amazing, but they shouldn’t be lumped in with Arial. And I rather have Calibri as the default Word font in lieu of Times New Roman.) Can you comment on those four specifically?
True, the Word 07 fonts are better than most operating system fonts, but they still suffer from the same problem of being optimized for screen display, not for printing. If you print any of the PDF samples on this site that use better text fonts and compare a sample of Cambria or Constantia, I think you’ll see what I mean.
I haven’t done it for years, but back when I had too much time on my hands I would scroll through the options and try to pick my “favorite” font. I pretty much always ended up with Palatino. Could you say a little more about why you would favor something over it?
Let me give full respect to Palatino. Designer Hermann Zapf’s original design (from 1950) is very lovely. But the version on your computer is not. Like Times New Roman, Palatino has been demolished by poor digital versions and relentless overuse.
If you really like Palatino, try Palatino Nova, Hermann Zapf’s update of the original design (from 2005—55 years (!) after the original). Much better than the one that ships with your operating system.
This site has a lot of interesting information on it, but is it really necessary to turn such a large portion of it into an advertisement for commercial fonts?
Most of the tips here don’t require you to buy a new font — you can use whatever you’ve got.
But with fonts, as with most other things, you get what you pay for. And if you want the best quality, you have to pay for it.
Even then, fonts are cheap. You can buy a super nice font family for $100-200. It will never go obsolete and you can use it every day. Compared to the other ways lawyers like to spend their technology dollars, I think that’s a pretty good deal.
Super!
It’s so interesting for us! Thanks!
What’s the relevance of fonts being “overexposed”? Typography, especially in the legal context, is about utility: what works best to convey information. Advising clean, efficient typography is one thing, and it’s smart and helpful. But since when is our job to be eye-catchingly unique?
It is true that operating system fonts are overexposed. Thus, to the extent an attorney might say to herself “I’m going to set this appellate brief in Trebuchet, a font with a fresh, 21st-century look!” I would say: you are mistaken.
But the functional reasons to avoid OS fonts are #2 (they’re ugly) and #3 (they don’t print well). These considerations have nothing to do with being “eye-catchingly unique” and everything to do with being clean and readable. And I hope you would agree that part of “our job” as attorneys is to produce clean and readable documents. Print out your next brief in Trebuchet and tell me how long you can read it before your eyes bleed and you scream in agony.
” I don’t want to name names, but my least favorite rhymes with Barial.”
I enjoyed this as well.
Thank you for the clarifications you have made in these comments. When I first read this page’s content I balked just like some, to your nixing Helvetica in the same breath as “Barial”. Indeed screen-optimization has surely diluted as opposed to distilled the essences of OS fonts.
Also I’m sure you are well aware but I’ll say anyway, Verdana was never intended to be printed at all, and is as far as I know the very first display-only font designed.
I would also like to thank you for assembling all this information in such a useful way, our office has now added your site to our list of argument-settling resources.
I think you’re wrong on Helvetica and Palatino. They are not optimized for the screen, and the versions that come with OS X are suitable for production work.
I would change this part to “avoid bogus fonts” like Arial, and “avoid screen fonts.”
Helvetica will never be overexposed. Also, for lawyers particularly, it’s better to stick to a very small number of fonts, and not try to get too creative.
I appreciate the advocacy, but your comment is misleading. True, Helvetica and Palatino were not originally designed for the screen. But the versions of Helvetica and Palatino bundled with the Windows and Mac operating systems are optimized for the screen. To that end, they diverge from the original designs in numerous ways.
I’ll admit to being skeptical about the importance of font choice, but then I was hired as a judicial law clerk, and I now spend my days reading briefs from all manner of attorneys. You can tell when a brief is formatted with some thought, as opposed to just using the defaults, and it really does make it easier to read.
One special plea: as MS Word 2007 becomes more prevalent, more briefs are coming in written in Cambria, and they are almost impossible to get through in one sitting. 3-4 pages into a brief, I get headaches; I’m not kidding.
Cambria is clearly not meant for long, professional documents, and it is the first thing I notice about a brief when it comes in. Please, I’m begging you - don’t use Cambria. Even if you don’t care about typography, just go back to Times New Roman.
[...] a solo litigator based in Los Angeles. (I’ve corresponded briefly with Matthew.) On this page of the site, I read the following: Avoid using the core operating system fonts in printed [...]
What about my buddy Gill Sans? I’m a big fan of it in projected presentations, but should I stay away in printed docements?
I feel like I’m learning a great deal here. Fabulous resource.
Gill Sans is fine. It’s a standard system font on the Mac these days. It hasn’t been mangled.
Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!
I study Graphic Design and am finding this a really valuable resource. One question though, how could Helvetica be optimised for screen, when it’s so minimalist in the first place.
A pixel is a square right, and most of Helvetica’s ascenders and descenders hit a straight line.
Also just for curiosity’s sake, what was the process for preparing a font for screen, did you have to cut back the serif’s or was the font just rendered as squares?
Cheers
Andrew
The essential problem in digital font engineering is the best way of fitting a scalable outline of a glyph onto a low-resolution pixel grid. This was a big problem when type was rendered in black & white only. It’s less of a problem these days because we have antialiased (greyscale) rendering of fonts on screen, though Windows and Mac solve the problem different ways.
Ah Rock ‘n’ roll! (I’d fix the apostrophie’s but I don’t know how on web!)
So how did you guys render font’s when they scaled at larger sizes?
Andrew
How do I know if I’m using versions optimized for screen or the originals?
Rupert Murdoch’s stewardship of the Wall St Journal has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, he recently poached automotive writer Dan Neil from the LA Times (who was one of the last reasons to read that paper). On the other hand, he has employed an art director who used Comic Sans as a headline font in today’s (June 5 2010) weekend section.
Say it ain’t so, Rupe.
P.S. This example illustrates one of the reasons Comic Sans is so objectionable: it doesn’t look like comic lettering! Which is too bad, since comic artists take lettering seriously. If one wanted to design a comic-inspired font, there’s plenty of terrific examples from the last, oh, 50 years that one could freely crib from. What Comic Sans really looks like is the handwriting of a third grader. Perhaps Kiddie Sans would’ve been a more apt name. But no comic artist would make lettering that sloppy. (By the way, this article was by Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, who made a font out of his lettering and uses that to make his daily strips.)
I regret to report that the Wall St Journal used Comic Sans again in today’s weekend section (June 12 2010). This time, its good friend Arial came along for the ride.
Notice that the WSJ had the budget for a custom comic-style illustration. But the effect is diluted by the poor typography.
“But how many comic-lettering fonts could there really be?” I guess you’re right, there can’t be more than a couple hundred or so.
I’ve been working to incorporate some of your thoughts in my practice, but am having trouble making it work. As a transactional lawyer, I find that people expect to have a Word version of document to review, compare, and annotate. Lately, I’ve been using Century Schoolbook for this purpose and I’ve actually begun to get attached to the more sophisticated feel of my documents.
Unfortunately, I just set my secretary up with a brand new Windows 7 Pro machine with Office 2007. I was surprised to see that Garamond was the only one your Tier 1 fonts that was included (although “Century” is similar to “Century Schoolbook”, it’s not quite the same).
Do you have any thoughts on the new Windows 7 system fonts?
Most of the fonts in the top tier are included as part of Office 2007.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/product.aspx?PID=148
Since it’s a new machine, you may want to run the installer again to make sure you instructed it to install all the fonts.