These are fonts that graphic designers would appreciate, below are ones that they wouldn't.

Design and development types take fonts very seriously. They even make documentaries about them.

By almost no one’s standards am I either. Still, I love a good fight over typeface. Why I’d really never fit the mold as a serious graphic designer, though, is because I’m not one to giggle at the standard set of Microsoft fonts. Indeed, there are a handful I actually quite like.

At the risk of facing the wrath of design quarters, below I share some of my favorite fonts that you probably have on every standard PC word processor, design application and font kit around.

Arial: OK. This is a quick way to turn off any professional designer. See, turns out Arial is considered a Microsoft knock off of the often worshiped Helvetica font. But guess what, I’ve always been a Microsoft user, so Arial is what I know. And knock off or not, I’ll say that I think I like Arial better anyway, and apparently you can tell the difference.

Boulder: I love me some sans serifs and rounded corners.

Cuckoo: Damn it, I like it. It’s that ‘y’ and that ‘k’ I think, which involve straight lines with the rounded corners of Boulder above.

Diediedie: Yes, something about a faux handwriting font wins over the uninitiated of us, and so I love diediedie. (This may be the root cause of the popularity of the much maligned Comic Sans).

Franklin Gothic: It’s more than a century old, perhaps named after Ben Franklin, a former standard newspaper font and still used in a variety of media, of course I dig this.

Heather: It’s a rare serif that works for me, something about the width, my friends.

Vagabond: See those notes from Boulder above, and add those bends and that ‘g’.

(I also love me some Herald, which I used for NEast, but that’s for another post.)

OK, either bash me for digging these basics from the Microsoft package or offer some others.