CHAPTER 9 The Next Steps for Web Typography
Combining Typefaces
Here comes the fun part — selecting typefaces. The art of choosing and
combining typefaces is well-covered in the pocket guide Combining Type-
faces^43 by Tim Brown. However, as Brown himself says, it takes practice. A
lot of practice.
Once you are able to recognize the classification of any typeface you
see, it becomes very easy to combine typefaces, simply because by the time
you are able to see the difference, you’ve learned plenty of other things
about typefaces and typography in general. Sorry for the bad news, but
the shortcut to successfully selecting and combining typefaces is 10,000
repetitions.
Seriously, the art of selecting typefaces is an art of narrowing down
your choices. Your project needs are your criteria. The better you know
the project, the pickier you become. After discarding all typefaces that
don’t have a full character set available, that miss some styles and weights,
that won’t look as good in a range of sizes, and that are generally rude in
the company of other typefaces — you are left with only a few reasonable
choices and in the end you only have to pick from a group of two or three.
To select a typeface, we must know how big the pond is. If we watch
and recognize only a handful of typefaces all the time, we cannot invent
something radically new and we end up with the same conventional de-
signs over and over again.
The first step in studying typefaces is to become familiar with the clas-
sification of typefaces and the history of typography. It is crucial to study
and investigate typefaces from all classifications, even the ones you think
you would never use.
For starters, focus on well-established professional typefaces. These
are popular for a reason. They work in demanding environments and they
resist ageing.43 http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/combining-typefaces