16,938 uses, 12,618 typefaces, and 28,217 registered users, &c.

January 4, 2021 1:44 PM

For 10 years, the “independent archive of typography” Fonts In Use has collected and organized examples of different fonts in the real world.
posted by Going To Maine (7 comments total)

Yikes.
posted by y2karl at 2:39 PM on January 4, 2021

2nd impression: Font names are more impressive, interesting and varied than fonts for the most part. The differences in the families of the latter can be subtle even imperceptible to the naive eye.But, understood in the context of art, art history and history in general, I do fail to see what is Gothic about the font of the same name.
posted by y2karl at 3:11 PM on January 4, 2021

Gothic in relation to type basically means 'sans-serif', as does Grotesk. It was originally derogatory, meaning roughly 'barbaric'. Some less academic uses and sites (such as dafont) use it to refer to blackletter type, as well.
posted by signal at 3:44 PM on January 4, 2021 [4 favorites]

I consult it frequently, looking for display font pairings. It’s very helpful.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:46 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

Love this.
posted by freakazoid at 4:07 PM on January 4, 2021

Metafilter actually noted its launch ten years ago as well!
posted by thecaddy at 4:31 PM on January 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

"2nd impression: Font names are more impressive, interesting and varied than fonts for the most part. The differences in the families of the latter can be subtle even imperceptible to the naive eye"

We're only seeing a small subset of the characters in each of these typefaces. Many become easier to tell apart when you see a larger assortment of characters (even to the naive eye). The lowercase "e" in Frederic Goudy's Berkeley and the uppercase "Q" in George Peignot's Cochin quickly sets them apart from other serif typefaces. Arial and Helvetica are pretty hard to tell apart until you see Arial's stupid uppercase "R".

This is the is a great resource for getting an idea of what fonts work well together (and what doesn't). But then you really have to play around with full character sets to see how they'll work for your particular project.
posted by jonathanhughes at 6:29 PM on January 4, 2021 [1 favorite]