21 Most Used Fonts By Professional Designers

Great roundup, I have about half of those, going to download the other half.

Keep of these great roundups

wow fonts really bother me a lot! thanks for the great share

@Brandon – Welcome at iShift, We also want to provide the download links for listed fonts but it’s certainly violating some laws. so we keep our limits.

@narendra – Welcome here, In my case, fonts bothers me too

5. Tarjan has to be 5. Trajan

Nice post!!

Where’s the Verdana love? Guess I’m the only fan. Cool post and I would have to say very accurate.

The most not be professional web designers without Arial or Verdana on the list.

The less “Bickham” font that exists in the world, the better.

You do realize “professional” is spelled incorrectly in your article image, right? There’s only one f.

Thanks for the list, these fonts look great!

Nice information and attractively presented!

Excellent list ! It really proves that classic, finely crafted fonts can’t get out of fashion.

wow, I love how you have links to download/install all those fonts………. ummmm…ya?

Just one curious quick question, how can we buy professional fonts in bulk, I saw couple of fonts selling website, they are selling them individually. It will be financial disaster if we have to fork all the money for each individual font. Any idea?

Where’s Comic Sans MS? I see that EVERYWHERE. It’s like, how do we look cool? Use Comic Sans MS.

Except it isn’t cool. It isn’t cool at all.

Thanks for the nice collection.

I use most of those fonts but I think DIN FF should be added and Myriad is seriously overused these days; I don’t think it looks very professional anymore.

Wow this is truly amazing! It’s absolutely fantastic and very interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Escoofield –
http://alotofit.com

Have Fun!

Are they listed in order of popularity? I imagine so, but it should have been stated. Also, I note you have included a whopping 13 sans serifs, 1 in between (Optima – my favorite), only six with serifs, of which one (Trajan) has only upper case, and one in another style – Bickham – of which the less said, the better. There are, in my opinion, too many sans serifs here; Frutiger, Interstate and Gotham are boring, while Franklin is useful but boring. Eurostyle is passé, and I dislike Rockwell on principle. The rest are remarkably similar. I think more serifs that are imaginative but businesslike are needed to make this a truly useful list. ITC Galliard and ITC Tiepolo are pleasing to the eye, and Goudy Old Style has its place. Something with an even lower x-height as well would tickle my eye. How can there be no serious Italic? – Bembo doesn’t count. And finally, there should be at least one good period font – my longtime favorite is the streamlined Sprint.

@Eureka:

Professional designers don’t use Comic Sans. Amateurs might.

My new favorite font is Georgia.

STUMBLED!

I’m a verdana lover myself, nice list.

I love typography, a font is a story. Thank for share!

Hey great list. There is so many bad fonts out the it can get very confusing, these are nice fonts and as always I read the comment for more handy tips

Myriad made the list because of lazy designers using the Adobe default.

I miss the 70′s and letraset…

@kuyuri

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arial#Criticism.2FSimilar_fonts for info on arial.
It’s the bastard child of Helvetica.

I love avenir. Didn’t know it was this popular. Maybe I’m not a professional.

Completely breath of what typography has to offer. This fonts teach about every are a font library should have.

Great list. Never heard of Avenir before today.

Thanks for posting this nice list..

Where’s verdana?

Arial is pretty much the Microsoft version of Helvetica only not as good. There is a good documentary film by Gary Hustwit about the no. 1 font in this list. It’s called ‘Helvetica.’

http://www.helveticafilm.com/

I’m a long-term professional designer, and while I have most if not all of these fonts in my collection I never use them. Why? Because I don’t like them. As you say, they’re overused, and not at all typographically elegant or suitable for most clients’ needs.

Typefaces are, to me, one of the joys of design – matching the brief with appropriate (or unexpected) visual style, and the font used is very much a part of the process.

I do however admit to a guilty secret – I’ve been using Calibri for body text quite a lot recently . . .

Good post, i love avantgarde

This is a nice assortment, however, it would be nice to know where to get them for free.

yer english sucks… what a waste of time this post was. No really, thanks! It makes such a difference.

Nice thoughtful post. I’ve been a professional designer for 24 years, and honestly, I’ve never used several of these. In fact, I intentionally avoid a few of them. One of the primary things that has plagued web design since its inception is horrible typography. I’m unsure if posts like this one help to improve or erode web designers’ understanding of good typography.

The idea that there are 20 most used fonts which represent good design on the web is a bit of an odd concept. Type is designed with very specific characteristics in mind for each typeface, therefore, each and every company, person, product, or service may be best represented by different typefaces. The fact that there are tens of thousands of typefaces is testament to this fact.

I encourage designers to explore and use many typefaces outside of the 20 listed here. Of course, I have my favorites as well, some of which are listed here. Helvetica, Trajan, Franklin, and various incarnations of Bodoni rank high on my list. That said, I would never use them simply because they are among my favorites. I only use them when their character perfectly fits the job.