60 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design

• By Vitaly Friedman
• March 20th, 2008
• Downloads, Freebies, Typography
• 90 Comments

Typography is more than being legible and looking good. Among other things, effective typography manages to achieve two important objectives: a) to create an appropriate atmosphere and enable users to develop trust toward the site and b) to make sure visitors get the main message of the site and (if possible) become interested in the services offered on the site. Since written text is the most efficient instrument to communicate with visitors precisely and directly, the power of typography shouldn’t be underestimated.

To communicate effectively, typography requires appropriate typefaces. Last year we’ve presented 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design, a selection of excellent typefaces one should be aware of when developing web-sites. Now it’s time to update our selection with typefaces we’ve missed then and new typefaces which have been developed over the last year.

Below you’ll find over 60 first-class typefaces for corporate design. Please notice that they are not free; however, we’ve focused on typefaces which are definitely worth spending money on. So which typefaces are “bulletproof”? What fonts can be used effectively in almost every Corporate Design? And what are the options for unique, but still incredibly beautiful typefaces? Let’s find out.

You might also want to take a look at the

• post 40 Free Fonts For Professional Design and
• at the section Fonts which has a number of typography-related posts.

60 Excellent Typefaces For Corporate Design

Haptic
The Haptic family is a sans serif typeface which was optimized for use in small sized text. It serves well in attention seeking headlines. Comes in Roman and Italic with seven weights each. Type & Graphics by Henning Skibbe.

FF Meta Serif
A collaborative work by Erik Spiekermann, Christian Schwarty and Kris Sowersby. The designers created a typeface with metrics that are not identical to FF Meta, but optically the same. Now what you see is what you get, a harmonious serif/sans type system. FF Meta Serif is available in four weights: Book, Medium, Bold, and Black, each with Italics. All styles include Small Caps, lining and oldstyle figures in proportional and tabular widths, and a range of arrows and other symbols.

Museo
A contemporary semi-slab serif font. This OpenType font family comes in five weights and offers supports CE languages and even esperanto. Beside ligatures, contextual alternatives, stylistic alternates, fractions and proportional/tabular figures Museo also has a ‘case’ feature for case-sensitive forms. This typeface comes in 5 weights; three of them are free.

Beorcana
Beorcana is a calligraphic sans, or serifless roman. Beorcana is unusual for a sans serif type; it is designed for extended reading. Beorcana fills a niche in book typography and also serves a wide range of purposes from fine print, cartography, and information design to signage, editorial design and invitations. Designed by Carl Crossgrove. “Beorcana has what it takes to become a classic.”

Gloriola
Type System / Superfamily winning entry on TDC2 2008. Designed by Tomáš Brousil from Prague, Czech Republic.

Agile Typeface
This typeface was born as Endexamen of the postgraduate study TypeMedia in The Hague. Not released yet, but worth to be kept in mind.

Marat
Marat is an elegant typeface with a soft and friendly appearance. It comes in 5 different weights and includes Italics, Small Caps, various OpenType features and a wide range of language support. Each font includes oldstyle and lining figures, both proportional and tabular. Created by Ludwig Übele from Den Haag, The Netherlands.

Graphik
“I ended up drawing inspiration from all parts of the 20th century. The heavy end of the family is based in part on Paul Renner’s Plak, a relatively obscure display typeface cut only in large sizes of woodtype, that is related to his heavier weights of Futura but has rounder, friendlier, fatter proportions“. By Christian Schwartz.

Rondana
Rondana is a tribute to the purity of line and futuristic aesthetics of the 60s and 70s. Geometry in service of Typography, rather than opposite.

Stag Sans
“The normal/quirky balance is a bit different in the heavy weights, which are more likely to be used for enormous headlines. The final result is a perfect match for Stag, and also works as a muscular counterpoint to just about any elegant serif face.”

Candy Script
Inspired by Argentina and its culture, Alejandro Paul’s Candy Script captures the country’s spirit. It comes from the tradition of window sign painting, but its thick hand-brushed characters — with alternates for almost every upper and lowercase letter – have a personality all their own. Tons of OpenType alternates included, over 600 characters in all.

FF Utility
Designed by Lukas Schneider. Comes in give weights — light, regular, medium, bold and black.

Ealing
Round, elegant and pretty thin. Six weights by Michael Parson.

Publico
The openness of the headline face made designing a matching text face very straightforward. Elegance gives way to sturdiness in the serifs, and the ball terminals are less pronounced, resulting in an even texture. Like Guardian Egyptian, Publico Text is drawn to work under the specific layout and printing conditions of newspapers but doesn’t take its design cues from traditional newspaper typefaces, resulting in a fresh and contemporary look.

Affair
Affair is an new calligraphic typeface by Alejandro Paul with a party full of swash characters, ligatures, and ornaments. By default, it’s simply an elegant yet readable display face. Dress it up with alternates, and it becomes irresistibly attractive, in styles from glamourous to over-the-top.

Prelo
A large sans-serif family with 18 weights with ligatures, alternates, fractions, scientific inferiors, superscript, swashes, oldstyle figures, lining figures, tabular figures, numerators, denominators, ordinals and smallcaps.

DST Glosa
A traditional, roman serif-family which comes in 8 weights (roman, roman italic, medium, medium italic, bold, bold italic, black, black italic) and has a number of additional features. OpenType.

Olicana
Beautiful hand-drawing in action. Comes in two weights — rough and smooth. Designed by Nick Cooke.

Malaga
“At first glance Malaga has all the earmarks of a sturdy old style serif that would hold up well to any amount of reading. Healthy spacing, large x-height, short ascenders and descenders. It is the second glance that has you realizing that it is perfect as well for larger headlines and bolder statements.” A modern classic by Xavier Dupré.

FF Unit Rounded
Designed by Erik Spiekermann.

Costa PTF
Costa ptf was designed to be appropriate for any use where you might desire to give an informal look in titling sizes but still need good legibility in small text sizes.

Arno Pro
“A multi-weight, multi-style, multi-optical sized, multi-lingual family of fonts in the classic Venetian tradition. It comes bundled with Adobe Creative Suite 3, and it’s almost worth upgrading just to get Arno.” Designed by Robert Slimbach.

Kinescope
Kinescope is a dashing 1940s-style brush script. It was inspired by hand-lettered titles in Fleischer Brothers’ Superman cartoon series. This font features OpenType to automatically choose the most aesthetically pleasing letter shapes as you type as well as extended language support. By Mark Simonson.

Anziano
A typeface for books. When creating a traditional typeface, Stefan Hattenbach was influenced by earlier designs. Anziano shows touches of Weiss (Emil Rudolf Weiss, 1926) – another classic book typeface. Stefan had appreciated the design of Weiss for a long time.

Celeste Sans OT
This OpenType serif family comes in 10 weights.

Sloop
Hand-writing: sexy, elegant, feminine and inviting.

Presidencia
This typeface is supposed to become an institutional typeface. Designed by Gabriel Martínez Meave from Mexico City. Winner of the TDC2 2008 award in the category “Text / Type Family”.

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, stylistic and contextual alternates, all interacting with each other to allow the composition of just the typographic look and feel. This font is best used where lush elegance is a design requirement.

Ronnia
One of the most remarkable characteristic of this humanistic sans serif is its versatility. Ronnia’s personality performs admirably in headlines, but is diffident enough for continuous text and small text alike. Ronnia features about 800 characters per weight, including small caps, fractions, old style and lining numbers, scientific superior/inferior figures, and a set of symbols and arrows. It supports over 40 languages that use the Latin extended alphabet.

Trinité
Classic, created by Bram de Does in 1982.

Newzald
A decent, hardworking serif designed for the international editorial environment. Its economical rigour is drawn from classic Dutch typefaces by J.F. Rosart and J.M. Fleischmann. Newzald’s large x-height and slightly condensed forms allow many words to the column without looking cramped or ungainly.

FP Dancer Pro Package

Fondo

Bree
A typeface with a strong personality.

Dancer
By Morten Olsen.

Quiosco

Xtra Sans

FF Eureka Sans family

Archer

Whitney

Mercury Text

Chronicle Deck & Display

Chronicle Text

Basic Commercial

FF Bau

Paralucent

Syntax

Region

FF Absara Headline

National

Voluta

Maquette

Omnes [via ilt]

Thesis
An ultimate corporate typeface, designed by Lucas de Groot. Including 144 fonts, both serif and sans-serif fonts.

Malaga Volume

Nexus
Designed by William McChesney. Comes in bold, bold oblique, oblique and regular. Price: $49 for all 4 weights.

Vesper
Currently in development.

Athelas

Frida (.pdf)

Sources and Resources

• Typographica’s Favorite Typefaces of 2007
  Typographica’s fourth annual review showcases the best in new typeface design.
• I Love Typography
  An ultimate blog about typography.
• Type Director’s Club
  The annual typeface competition by Type Director’s Club.
• Typefacedesign.org
  Work from the MA Typeface Design class of 2007 at the University of Reading.
• 100 Best Typefaces Of All Time
  An outstanding selection by Fontshop.de.
• Type foundries: Fontshop.com, Emigre, Veer, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Linotype and many-many more.