For identication of fonts, or to find a font by name, use: http://www.identifont.com/
Serifs are the small ticks at the end of letters. Serif fonts use these ticks, and in printed media, can guide the reader's eye from one letter to the next. I believe that serif fonts in screen media are too busy, and so these fonts should be reserved for print. The classic example of a serif font is Times New Roman.
Sans-serif fonts lack the small ticks at the end of the letters. Traditionally, in print, these fonts were reserved for headlines. In screen media, however, I believe these fonts look cleaner and are more readable. Sans-serif fonts can be crudely broken down into the following sub-categories.:
| Name | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Grotesque | Traditional sans-serif fonts. Straight with low variation of width. | Grotesque |
| Neo-grotesque / Transitional | A more modern take on grotesque | Arial, Helvetica, Univers |
| Humanist | A more moden class of san-serif, where letters have more varied widths | Johnson, Gill Sanes, Frutiger, Myriad, Segoe UI, Optima |
| Geometric | Based on geometic shapes - lines and curves with first order continuity | Avant Garde, Century Gothic, Futura, Gotham, or Spartan |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_%28typeface%29 Commissioned by Frank Pick and designed by Edward Johnson. Used by London Electric Railway Company and now used for the Tube. Broke from Grotesque sans serif fonts and that it moved away from the square shapes. It's letters had more varying widths. The dots on the i, j, and full stops are diamonds. Johnson also designed the famous LU roundel Logo
Johnson was redesigned in 1979 by Eiichi Kono. This variant is currently used by the London Underground.
A humanist sans-serif font designed by Eric Gill in 1927-30 took inspiration from Johnson Gill worked under Johnson Used by the BBC
Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert - 1957-1963 Used for British Road signs
A rounded sans-serif typeface designed by Adrian Frutiger
A refinement of Frutiger, with the biggest change being the italic characters.
An Adobe font based on Frutiger Used by: Apple
Microsoft set up a commitee to decide the core fonts that should be supported by all web users. The committee has since been disbanded. The fonts were:
It is claimed that Microsoft's Segoe UI and Adobe's Myriad are almost identical http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger
Steile Futura