10 July 2024
6 minute
read
Top Fonts for Architects
Written by
Steven Rubio
Buildings have character, a certain set of characteristics that define them. And in the same way, fonts also need to have "character" (pun intended). Fonts need to have identity and context. So in a way, they share many common traits with the buildings we design.
Now, when you see a building you can almost define it with a certain font, right? And in the same way, when you see a specific architect, you instantly have a set of fonts that could define their "brand". The font they use is a reflection of their brand and in that sense, a reflection of their architecture.
If I was to ask you, what font do you think Mies van der Rohe would use versus what font would Zaha Hadid use, or what font would Frank Ghery use, I imagine your response to each of these would be different, right?
I don't suppose you think Mies is going to use a comic sans, or Zaha a Times New Roman. Each of them would probably use a font that would go in line with their style and brand. They would be careful and precise when choosing a font.
Now, if they are precise when choosing a font, you should be precise too. The font you choose should be a reflection of the building you design or your personal character and style.
Roboto has a dual nature. It has a mechanical skeleton and the forms are largely geometric. At the same time, the font features friendly and open curves. While some grotesks distort their letterforms to force a rigid rhythm, Roboto doesn’t compromise, allowing letters to be settled into their natural width. This makes for a more natural reading rhythm more commonly found in humanist and serif types.
Download Roboto here
Merriweather was designed to be a text face that is pleasant to read on screens. It features a very large x height, slightly condensed letterforms, a mild diagonal stress, sturdy serifs and open forms.
Download Merriweather here.
Rubik is a sans serif font family with slightly rounded corners designed by Philipp Hubert and Sebastian Fischer at Hubert & Fischer as part of the Chrome Cube Lab project.
Rubik is a 5 weight family with Roman and Italic styles, that accompanies Rubik Mono One, a monospaced variation of the Black roman design.
Meir Sadan redesigned the Hebrew component in 2015. Alexei Vanyashin redesigned the Cyrillic component in 2016.
Download Rubik here.
EB Garamond is intended to be an excellent, classical, Garamond. It is a community project to create a revival of Claude Garamont’s famous humanist typefaces from the mid-16th century. This digital version reproduces the original design by Claude Garamont closely: The source for the letterforms is a scan of a specimen known as the “Berner specimen,” which was composed in 1592 by Conrad Berner, the son-in-law of Christian Egenolff and his successor at the Egenolff print office. This specimen shows Garamont’s roman and Granjon’s italic types at different sizes. Hence the name of this project: Egenolff-Berner Garamond.
Download Garamond here.
Futura is a geometric sans-serif typeface released as far back as the 1930s. Unlike many sans-serif designs intended for display purposes, Futura has quite a low height, making it all the more suitable for body text. Futura is based on geometric shapes and is a work of art. It supports uppercase characters, lowercase characters, and even special characters and has other fonts in its sub-category e.g. Futura BT heavy, Futura BT extra black amongst others. Futura remains an important typeface family and is used on a daily basis for print and digital purposes as both a headline and body font. It contains 22 styles, both OTF and TTF formats.
Download Futura here
The old posters and signs in the traditional Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires inspired Julieta Ulanovsky to design this typeface and rescue the beauty of urban typography that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. As urban development changes that place, it will never return to its original form and loses forever the designs that are so special and unique. The letters that inspired this project have work, dedication, care, color, contrast, light and life, day and night! These are the types that make the city look so beautiful. The Montserrat Project began with the idea to rescue what is in Montserrat and set it free under a libre license, the SIL Open Font License.
Download Montserrat here
Space Mono is an original fixed-width type family designed by Colophon Foundry for Google Design. It supports a Latin Extended glyph set, enabling typesetting for English and other Western European languages.
Download here
Geometric sans serif typefaces have always been popular, and with support for both the Devanagari and Latin writing systems, Poppins is an internationalist addition to the genre.
Download here
If you want to check out the video version of this article, watch it down below!
