typeface recommendations

Question

I'm not an expert in graphic design, but I have some basic knowledge. So I would like to ask some typeface choice recommendations. I'm designing a website for a potter where he will present his work and probably sell products. As a pottery website, it's important for him to preserve the 'traditional' value of handmade products, while giving it a fresh and modern style to it (avoid making it look too 'old'). For example, every product sold by him is a handmade product, they can look similar between them (for example, same pots thrown at the potters wheel) but if you look into the details every one of them is different and 'unique'.

I thought a good choice might be a humanist sans-serif typeface, because it represents this combination of modern yet 'handmade looking' style. Maybe pairing it with an old-style or transitional serif? What do you think?

Answer 1

I recommend Freight Sans, a humanist sans-serif.

It's quite open and a little bit lighter than most body text typefaces on the web. So it feels very fresh to me. It's used as the body text on stratechery.com, for example, and I think it looks really good there. It feels like a good balance between hand-made and fresh and modern, and feels very premium.

As for a serif, you might like English Engravers, a delicate serif inspired by arts and crafts hand lettering of the early twentieth century:

And it may not be quite what you were asking for but I really think you might like the light italic styles of FF Kaytek Slab, a new slab serif typeface, for headings. It's part of a family but its light italic weights again have the freshness I think could suit your clients, it feels like it takes inspiration from hand lettering like on blueprints without taking it too far and becoming cheesy.

Answer 2

The question of which typeface to use is always a debatable one, and 100% personal / customer preference. There have been numerous studies on the different styles of type, all with different theories and recommendations. And this is also HEAVILY impacted by what the current popular design trends are.

A humanist sans-serif / hybrid would be a good suggestion given current design trends. To be safe, make sure to call out a web standard default family in you CSS. Also, if you want something other than the traditional defaults, I would pick from Google's Open Source hosted web fonts to make sure that they are accessible on any device / browser. You can find some background on the Google Fonts HERE.

Being an artist's page, a mix of designer font for headers and very readable font text might add a nice flair. Below are a couple handwritten style fonts that are fairly open and easily readable that might look nice. BUT! These are fonts that IMHO would look nice. You, your customer, or other people might disagree.

Masculine:

Feminine:

Neutral:

Header: