A very long chart of the font combinations.I also tweaked font size and leading in the interest of creating uniformity amongst the examples. This involved using the occasional semibold or light to balance a font out at certain point size. Our context here was strictly delimited, and so any of these combinations might warrant further experimentation for even better results.įinally, I tried to keep the look of each example as close as possible to each other. Pretty much any two fonts can be balanced out and made to work with each other in some type of context. You may love some of these combinations and hate others, or be unphased by yet others (or you may think I dwell on this too much). I simply choose to spread them out amongst themselves, keeping the use of repeats down to a minimum. (all serif typefaces) to go with Futura (a sans serif typeface). For instance, I could have picked Baskerville, Caslon, Garamond, or Minion, etc. I tried to mix it up, but had to make some arbitrary decisions. All the font combinations got the same “lorem” text. I chose the simple model of a bold headline font and normal weight body font. Set a line of Times Roman over Garamond and you’ll see what I mean. For excellent font pairings, the farther apart the typeface styles are, as a guideline, the more luck you’ll have. I simply followed the golden rule of font combinations, which is simply to combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. What we have here is that list of 19 top fonts once again, but this time combined into pairs to give us 19 best font combinations. Take a look at those top fonts if you want and come right back because now we are going to have a little typography fun. Why 19? Because at exactly 20, the “long tail” shot right out and the differences in tallies became negligible.

I could have had 100, but I got it down to under 50, and from there whittled it down to just the 19 best fonts. Update: April 5, 2016: I recently compiled a list of the 19 most popular fonts according to usage by graphic designers from all over the web. Update: February 26, 2019: After nine years of the digital-only edition, the Big Book of Font Combinations is available in glorious, full-sized print editions: paperback and hardcover.

Helvetica neue font pairing