Combining Type

I have to admit that I have a fear of combining typefaces. It’s not that I haven’t paid attention in Type 1 & 2, but I am not completely confident in my ability. I view typography as one of those fields that you can never know too much about. Sometimes, it feels like I have spent as much time researching and selecting the type as it took me to complete the entire project.

In an article titled My Type Design Philosophy, author Martin Majoor states, “As a book designer I made several complex books where more than one typeface had to be used in order to clarify things in the text. It was mostly quite useful to take a sans and a serif typeface, but the problem was always which ones to choose. Mixing Times New Roman and Helvetica in the same piece of text has often been done simply because these fonts were available everywhere. It is not even the worst possible combination one can think of. Using sans serifs like News Gothic, Gill Sans or Futura as text type is very acceptable, but with which seriffed faces should they be mixed? Numerous combinations have been used without any idea of style or knowledge of history. From an aesthetic point of view some combinations produce a severe headache (Garamond with Univers, Bodoni with Gill Sans). It is only in advertising, where a headache can be useful, that these combinations are possible. It became clear to me that the best solution for text was to use a combination of a serif and a sans that derive directly from each other. The only remaining question was which combination of serif and sans could meet this criterium?”

How do you feel about his philosophy?
Do you take type this seriously in your designs?

You can read the rest of the article at
http://www.typotheque.com/articles/my_type_design_philosophy/