Cast of Characters: The Complex Guide to Fonts

CHIPS-NYall the fonts relevant to the Complex audience

American Typewriter is the font made famous by Milton Glaser's I Heart NY logo and the many, many rip-offs since. This font takes its cues from old-school typewriter fonts like Courier. Instead of being monospaced, though (where each letter takes up the exact same width), this typeface is proportionally spaced,
which means that it'll look and read smoother
than something that actually came off of a
typewriter. Technology!

If you've driven in Germany (or flown JetBlue) you've seen this geometric sans-serif lurking around. DIN shares the rigid, grid-based structure of the early Bauhaus in Germany and, in some form or another, has been the official typeface for road signage in Germany since.

Bill Gates created this font as one of the original web-safe fonts. Your computer knows it automatically, and it will never, ever go away. Unfortunately it's pretty second-rate. Off-screen, it's worth about as much as this money from Zimbabwe, which also happens to be printed in Arial.

UNDFTD is a huge fan of this font, a takedown of the American Air Force standard identifier for its planes and uniform patches. TC Lai's Amarillo is a useable version of the classic military lettering that is clear and looks tough as shit. Use it.

Neuland is used a lot when an exotic or primitive look is desired, and a variant was used for the Jurassic Park films. Some consider this font to be racist because it has been used in the past to paint African culture as primitive. American Spirit cigarettes uses it too, though, so who knows.

Designed at the height of the Bauhaus, Futura's geometric forms prophesized a shiny, sleek future where the letters are pointy and the O's are perfect circles. Maybe you've seen it before on a Barbara Kruger installation...or maybe you've heard of this brand called Supreme.

People like Stephen Powers (ESPO) have been bringing back the tradition of sign-painting in a major way. The good dudes at House Industries created this little package to give designers some of the same effects without having to worry about all that pesky skill or those toxic enamel fumes.

The quintessential British typeface, Gill Sans, has been used to brand the BBC, Penguin Books, and the London Underground. It is also notable for having graced Twinings Tea's packaging. Keep that pinky up.

This default MS Word font has recently been picked up by publications on forward-thinking fashion (Fantastic Man) and music ('Sup Magazine). Go figure.

There is no conceivable reason to ever use this font, unless you're making the most expensive movie of all time. Nice one, James Cameron. You fantastic dickhead.

Until last year, you probably only ever saw Verdana while you were trolling message boards. The font was designed in 1996 for Microsoft by font-master Matthew Carter to look good on a computer screen. And then those crazy Swedes over at IKEA got the whole design world in a tizzy by deciding to use a computer-only typeface for its mammoth
print catalog. IKEA might have been right,
though. It looks pretty cool.

Georgia, also designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft, was designed as a serif typeface specifically for on-screen reading. It's one of only a handful of "web-safe" fonts, and the nicest of the serif options. The numbers are specifically designed to line up neatly.

Sometimes you just need a good font to write "Happy Bar Mitzvah." This one works for that. It's fake Hebrew, though, so there is a chance that some people are going to get upset if you use it the wrong way. Not a huge problem, just something to keep in mind if you plan on being particularly inappropriate.

The Didot family was an actual family of designers, and Mom, Dad, and the kids really loved their letters. Their namesake font, Didot, is characterized by extreme contrast between the thin and thick strokes and has long been a favorite of the fashion editorial world. Thinner is always better, right? Didot's Italian cousin, Bodoni, is also worth checking out if you're
trying to make something look slimmed up.

Chicago, the font, is recognizable to early technology adopters as the typeface the first generations of iPods used to display music and track information. Chicago, the city, was where R. Kelly (allegedly) decided to relieve himself on a teenage fan around the same time that those iPods came out. Oh, when worlds collide.

Straight Outta Paris, this font was designed by the same dude who did Banco (the Thrasher Magazine font). Roger Excoffon pretty much murdered the font world before anyone reading this was born.

Clearview is the result of years of research in road-sign design and readability testing. Among other improvements, the larger counter spaces (those are the spaces inside the e's, b's, etc.) allow for increased legibility at a distance. The Federal Government likes it so much that Congress just passed down a law that says all traffic signs need to be in this font
by 2018. It's going to cost NYC $27.5M to
switch up all of its street signs. Awesome.

Cooper Black, you goofy bastard. You've graced everything from National Lampoon to Diff'rent Strokes to those fuzzy, iron-on T-shirt letters in the ’80s to the packaging for Top Ramen. No one takes you seriously, but we really do love having you around.

Mandarin, at times, falls in the category of "racist" fonts. When Abercrombie uses it to make a T-shirt about "Wong Laundry," it's racist. When your local Chinese food restuarant uses it, it's cool.

Even though this font was made during the Great Depression, for some reason everybody thinks it should be used on their futuristic sci-fi movie posters. Here's to a more-money future.

In Rome there is actually a column called "The Trajan Column," an architectural structure engraved with this font—it has served as the basis for all Roman letterforms ever since the structure went up. Unfortunately, the modern-day font based on this insanely important inscription is pretty much only used on posters for bad movies.

The 100% best choice of font when tasked with designing a bag of ice.

Believe it or not, people used to read printed books, which is where a lot of these fonts came from. This one is designed to get reaaaaally, really tiny. Like giant-dictionary-sitting-in-the-library tiny. But that's not all it's famous for: This also happens to be one of the most expensive fonts you can buy—the package will run you just under five grand.

The guys who design mixtapes love these pre-distressed, out-of-the-box fonts. For maximum effect, pair with some lens flares and make everything all sparkly. Just be careful when you're typing two E's in a row, it'll look exactly the same. The designer of Jeezy's latest didn't slip on that, though, he customized the EE to make it look right.

Avant Garde was designed for the magazine of the same name in the early ’70s. Nice for designing things like the sign for your Miami penthouse or for your college-dorm coke den.

Fun Courier fact #1: IBM commissioned the original design of the Courier font for use in the company's typewriters, but IBM failed to lock down the legal rights to keep it exclusive. Because it had no copyrights for the font, most typewriter companies had appropriated the font within a few years.
Fun Courier fact #2: All screenplays are written
in 12-point Courier.
Fun Courier Fact #3: The original name was
Messenger.
Fun Courier Fact #4: All the U.S. military dog
tags are stamped with this font.

Every skinny kid who lives in Williamsburg or Echo Park has seen the Helvetica movie. What are ya gonna do. Sometimes it's just better to sit at the bar in silence and not tell anyone what you do for a living.

Typography.com calls Gotham, "assertive but never imposing, friendly but never folksy, confident but never aloof." It also seems to make a lot of sense that the king of the free world used a typeface named after NYC. Lol-zers. We got you, Barry.

Friz Quadrata, designed in 1973, is associated with two wildly different sounds: 1. Hardcore punk, because the iconic typeface was used in the logos of bands like Black Flag and Bad Religion. 2. That "doink doink" noise you hear when the address of the murderer's house pops up on Law & Order.

The font everyone loves to hate. Sure, its dumb-looking, but you have to admit it really gives those email forwards from your mom a real "personal look and feel," as they say. Probably not the best choice for writing corporate memos—but hey, even Jordan missed a few shots.

When Steve Jobs picks your font for his corporate everything, it's time to get a bigger mailbox for the royalty checks on the way. Myriad has been Apple's corporate font since 2002. This font family has unique "y" and "e" letters, which make the group easy to identify.

Designed in 1951. Yeah, Banco was way ahead of its time—but wow, what a banger by the Frenchie Excoffon. Ever heard of Thrasher Magazine? Yeah, this is that one.

This typeface is a clean, solid sans-serif font with masculine proportions; perfect for your new men's fashion line. Oh, wait. Never mind.