Oct

20 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design

Fonts

Designing a beautiful, legible typeface is hard work and takes time and patience. The type family has to convey a message clearly and effectively, regardless of the setting in which it is used. Of course, thousands of freely available fonts are out there, and some free fonts are very impressive. Yet only a few free fonts manage to beat the look and feel of a carefully designed professional typeface, one that has been painstakingly developed over years with a close attention to tiny details.

1. Bodoni Script Pro

Bodoni Script Pro | PDF specimen | Price: €69+
Designed by Panos Vassillou, this typeface was designed with connected characters and capitals with calligraphic elements. Bodoni Script Pro is a 3-weight family; each font comes with 725 glyphs, including a large number of alternates, as well as 144 ornaments.

2. Geogrotesque

Geogrotesque | Gallery | Price: $50 each
Geogrotesque is a semi-modular typeface with a subtle rounded finish. All the characters are based on the same formal principle, with corresponding optical adjustments to adapt the system to an alphabet for texts. ?Although the type family has a geometric or “technological” construction, the rounded finish lends a warm appearance, making the typefaces more accessible.

3. Museo and Museo Sans

Museo | Gallery | Price: $29.95 for all five fonts
Museo is a clean yet unconventional semi-serif, designed by Jos Buivenga. This OpenType font family comes in five weights, and each weight comes with support for CE languages, even Esperanto. Besides ligatures, contextual alternatives, stylistic alternates, fractions and proportional/tabular figures, Museo has a “case” feature for case-sensitive forms. The sans-serif version is a sturdy, low-contrast, geometric, highly legible sans-serif typeface that is well suited to any display and text use.

Both typefaces are lucid and versatile, great for cool-looking headlines but also effective as medium-sized text. Bonus: some weights of Museo are available for free downloading: Museo Free Download, Museo Sans Free Download.

4. Gotham Narrow

Gotham Narrow
Gotham is new, economical and designed specifically for text. The typeface can be used in publications, on websites, for branding and on book covers and posters. The typeface includes four different widths, from regular to condensed, and each style is paired with a matching italic. For tables and charts, Gotham’s core styles include a “Numeric” range that contains tabular figures, fractions and extended symbols.

5. Metroscript

Metroscript | Gallery | Price: $99 for all five fonts
With Metroscript, New York-based lettering artist Michael Doret has adapted his trademark hand-lettering style to the computer, creating one of the most sophisticated suites of script fonts on the market. Metroscript was successful throughout 2008 and proudly holds the title of MyFonts’ Brush Script Font of the Year.

6. Locator

Locator | PDF specimen | Price: $250 (complete family)
Designed by Eric Olson in 2002/2003, Locator was originally proposed as a custom typeface for the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota. Locator is now a complete family of 12 fonts with true italic. Since its release in the spring of 2003, Locator has been used for a range of projects, including books, signage, corporate identity and even the company’s website.

Locator

7. Madawaska

Madawaska | Gallery | Price: $29.95 for all 34 fonts
Madawaska, a slab-serif family, has a bit of both: some of the ruggedness of the creator’s display work, and the extensive structure of a text family. With seven weights, including some very subtle hairline versions, it’s versatile and widely usable. Madawaska comes with fractions, old-style numerals and lining numerals. This typeface may not look as solid and professional as others, but it gives your copy a modern, strong and original appearance.

8. Olicana

Olicana | PDF specimen | Price: €79,00 per family
A beautiful typeface script in action. There are over 100 ligatures, which, when activated in a layout program, introduce more inconsistencies, making for a more convincing handwritten appearance. The typeface also has a more ornate style (swash feature), so the user has a choice between “old” and “new” styles. There are also replacement ligatures for double swashes appearing together.

As a final touch of authenticity, there are eight difference lengths of strike-throughs. When inserted after a word, these special characters cross out the “mistake.” There are also eight “splats,” including ink blobs and even partial fingerprints. The typeface comes in two weights, rough and smooth. Designed by Nick Cooke.

9. Ronnia

Ronnia | PDF specimen | Price: €29+
One of the most remarkable characteristics of this humanistic sans-serif is its versatility. Ronnia has been engineered mainly for newspaper and magazine applications, as evidenced by its properties: economical in use, highly legible and friendly and charming in character. Ronnia was part of the Tipos Latinos exhibition 2008 and the 23rd Biennale of Graphic Design 2008 in Brno.

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10. Skolar

Skolar | PDF specimen | Price: €49+
Skolar is a serifed typeface that has been designed specifically for scholarly multilingual publications. The relatively large x-height puts the typeface’s proportions somewhere between a book and newspaper’s typeface. The capitals are rather low compared to the ascenders to give the typeface even more texture and space for capital diacritical marks. These characteristics were introduced to improve readability in smaller sizes. Skolar received international recognition at the Ed-Awards competition 2008.

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11. Capsa

Capsa | Specimen | Price: $130 for 6 weights
Capsa was inspired by the work of mid-18th-century Parisian printer Claude Lamesle. It is an original design with classical flair, expert typesetting features and full, contemporary character sets. The Capsa family is an ideal book type: highly legible with beautifully fluid swash and italic styles. The Patterns and Vignettes fonts comprise a useful collection of decorative borders and ornaments. OpenType features include small caps, ligatures, alternates, old-style figures, lining figures, tabular figures, fractions, scientific inferiors, superscript, swashes, numerators, denominators and ordinals.

12. FF Meta Serif

FF Meta Serif | Gallery
The OpenType version of FF Meta Serif offers Book, Medium, Bold and Black, each including italics and, of course, small caps, OSF, LF, TF and a range of arrows and other symbols. While it stands on its own in a wide range of applications, the extra benefit is its close relationship to the original FF Meta, its sans serif sister.

13. Buffet Script

Buffet Script
Buffet Script is based on calligraphy by Alf Becker, arguably the greatest American sign-lettering artist of all time. Buffet Script’s OpenType programming contains discretionary ligatures and stylistic and contextual alternates, all interacting with each other to allow the composition of just the right typographic look and feel. This font is best used where lush elegance is a design requirement.

14. Opal

Opal | Preview | Price: €70,21+ per typeface
Opal is a text face with noble aspirations, yearning for luxury and still delivering. Because of the long ascenders that rise clearly above the capital letters, Opal should be set with generous line spacing. The typeface’s design has the attributes of the old-style Renaissance serifs, yet Opal is not based on any specific predecessors.

15. Akagi

Akagi | PDF specimen | Price: all 20 weights for $400
Akasi is a legible sans-serif family with modern, crisp, clean and legible glyphs for corporate designs and magazines. Designed by Neil Summerour.

16. Encore Sans Pro

Encore Sans Pro | PDF specimen | Price: €65,00 per weight
This typeface is supposed to be a perfect alternative to any overused classic sans typeface. Encore Sans Pro is a humanistic sans-serif that projects an image of reliability, authority and competence, making it ideal for corporate applications. A functional typeface that combines utility, simplicity, clarity and style. Contemporary and elegant. Coming in OpenType, the family consists of 22 fonts (also available as separate weights).

17. Stag

Stag | PDF specimen | Price: $50+
A new slab-serif for bold, forceful headlines, with a very large x-height, extremely short ascenders and descenders, and tight spacing, for a compact, contemporary look. In 2008, three new weights were added in order to match the full range of weights offered in Stag’s sans-serif companion, Stag Sans, in the hope of adding more flexibility to this eccentric family. Designed by Christan Schwartz.

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18. Comenia

Comenia | PDF specimen | Price: €21+
Comenia, a school typeface system, was developed as a typographic system for use at all levels of schools and universities. It introduces new aesthetic standards aimed to improve reading and writing skills and enhance the appeal of texts for pupils, students, teachers and office and IT staff at schools. It offers a clear, understandable and universal graphic tool for electronic typography, information systems and laying out primers, textbooks and educational texts and materials. The family consists of 19 fonts.

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19. Router

Router | PDF specimen | Price: $49+
Router is located at the intersection of mechanical and organic. Unlike other rounded sans-serifs with simple rounded terminals, Router flexes outward, mimicking the physical process of carving letters into plastic or metal. These details function exceptionally at display size, and disappear to satisfying effect in text, creating a legible, organic and evenly colored body copy.

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20. Paz

Paz | Gallery | Price: $69 for all 4 fonts.
Paz, a squarish 4-weight industrial family, ranging from extreme hairline to black, is ideal for editorial headlines in which type plays a major role in the overall design. The fonts were designed by Ariel Di Lisio and digitized by Alejandro Paul.