A Crisis of Typographic Proportions

[Peace Alliance]

I have been confident since the day i first did a design for RWL that Times New Roman was the font for us... The original "R" logo i made was times. A Sarif font makes sense, since it's such an old font style, used in old texts and with the original printing press. An old font... But not nearly as old as scripts!

The title for the Redwall book series uses the Old English Font (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Text). This is based off of really old scripts, and the way people used to write things. Of course, I could never use this font for the body of our text. In fact, using it in anything other then a title would be impossible to read. Also, not many people have any version of this font on their computer, and every font i chose has to be popular with web browsers... I've used the old english text R as well, in a logo at some point (currently the R I'm using is from the font Phalyn, a neat looking scripty font)

So Times New Roman has been what I've been using. But lately, with the design of new pages I've been enlarging the font size and doing more exaggerated things with it. I've also been trying very very hard to create really tight copy's. The more i think about it, times is a pain in the butt! A sans serif font would be SO much nicer, so much easier to align. Sans serifs are the easiest to read on websites. Don't get me wrong, i've been giving other serif's a chance too. Georgia is a really pretty font, but the numbers are all funky looking, and as we all know, numbers are pretty important on RWL. Palatino was also tried, but it's not very readable to begin with, better on white, i would say. And also with a lot of white space around it.

So where does that leave me? It leaves me with a sans serif font! Ack! I donno why i've been avoiding it... Other then because they look so modern and what i really want is something that makes you think of Old English Text while being legible. Helvetica (arial), is of course the most popular (anyone who knows about type [or watches documentary's linked to you by windy -_-] knows that helvetica is friggin everywhere). But it's boring... Lucida Sans is narrow looking and the spacing is funny... Verdana is alright. But what i really like is Trebuchet MS... I don't think many people have that font though! It's great, looks really good in large sizes and... well... I think that I'm going to switch to it! Maybe with Verdana as the backup, and helvetica as the back up to the back up...

But that means that the text won't seem old anymore... How will i overcome this? Especially when so much of my design already looks so modern (like a shiney silver fox head... heh). I think I'm going to have to explore ways of making the general style of things look older. I've already tried it in a few places, you'll notice the top of the menu on turbo does that (with the R).

[Pippin]

Good luck with the whole concept, im sure it will turn out just right :)

[windhound]

Pah, monospace is the way to go!  No spacing issues :D
And what do you mean helvetica is ugly?!
0123456789 ... yeah, alright.  a little odd with Georgia
You like this though?  Really?
Alright, it is kinda neat

[Peace Alliance]

You gotta try it with bolds, largeness and colours. Actually check out the start page i was workin on...