Nice presentation. Poking around on myfonts… all your fonts your sweet. Trying… hard… not… to… impulse… buy… everything…
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Well, there were no more votes so I closed the poll.
I guess having a large family of weights and having an adequate coverage is the answer.
The aesthetics of the font is both very important and very unimportant. When I design a font I have an idea of what I want it to look like and I try to stay true to that idea whilst at the same time letting it develop into what it wants to be. I know this sounds crazy but sometimes a font takes on a life of it’s own and pulls the design in a certain direction, it is difficult to explain but some of the best projects come out of this.
For the person choosing (or not) the font the aesthetics are either right for them or not. I have no way of knowing what the potential user wants so I design it the way I want it to be. Unless I get feedback on what the users want or I have a specific remit to fulfill.
As a side note the projects where someone else is calling the shots are the worst projects I have had to work on and as I am not getting paid for any of this I tend to avoid them like the plague.
So I guess my next project will have a greater family of weights, not just the regular and bold. The coverage will be just as comprehensive as always.
I think the poll sample wasn’t large enough to draw that conclusion, and having to choose between aesthetics and weights likely distorted the importance of each. If you had rephrased to question to say, “the right look or personality for the job” instead of “aesthetics,” I think the responses would have been different.
Aesthetics can mean several different things to different people. A typeface can be aesthetically interesting and well-designed, but if those aesthetic qualities are inappropriate for the job at hand, a designer won’t choose it. No one will pick a typeface that doesn’t have the personality or look they need, despite the number of available font weights.
For example, when a designer needs a modern-looking, geometric typeface for a corporate client, they won’t choose an aesthetically elegant script face just because it comes in more weights. On the other hand, there are many contemporary geometric faces to choose from, so the deciding factor between one and the other could be that one comes in ten different weights while the other only comes in four.
That’s true, but it is possible to know which general type styles are most popular and what kinds of typefaces or font qualities are needed to fill new niches. Monotype’s yearly Type Trends book, for example, provides much information on what people are buying.
Really the aesthetics should not have been part of the survey at all. The original question was “Given two fonts which are both equally suitable for a project how would you choose between them ?”
I see now that I should not have included the option about aesthetics in the possible answers, I just wanted to know if coverage was a deciding factor or if having lots of clever open type features was a big influence on peoples decision or if lots of weights was the thing that attracted people, things like that.
To me the aesthetics is the way it looks, the visual attractiveness, including it’s style and character.
In general when I design a typeface I design it for myself, the way I want it to look, then I release it just because someone else might find it useful. This survey was to try and find out what more people find useful.
The book is interesting and I will give it a read. Thanks.
I don’t think I explained what I was getting at well enough.
For me, and I think for most, the right aesthetic qualities are always paramount when choosing a typeface for a project, but what is aesthetically appropriate in one instance might not be for the next.
For example, Franklin Gothic is an aesthetically appealing typeface for a newspaper headline, but maybe not as much for a formal wedding invitation. Type designers tend to think in terms of making aesthetically pleasing fonts. Graphic designers, on the other hand, think more along the lines of how this or that font can be used to help create something else.
My point was that you, a type designer, might be asking about a font’s inherent aesthetics, but a graphic designer might be more inclined to interpret the question in terms of the appropriateness of this or that typeface for the project at hand.
I’m sorry for misinterpreting.
I would always classify the aesthetics of something and it’s suitability for a particular purpose differently, after all an orchid can be very beautiful but if it is in a field of potatoes it is a weed.
I am not trying to correct you, what you said is completely correct, I suppose the way something looks depends on where you stand to look at it.