My favorite standard Microsoft fonts

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.