Famous fonts:
the stories behind 15 typefaces

The table lists the 15 typefaces in order, with their designer and the problem each was built to solve.

Table: 15 famous typefaces, their designers and the problem each solved

Gutenberg's blackletter (c. 1455)

Johannes Gutenberg's 42-line Bible, printed in Mainz around 1455, used a dense blackletter type called Textura, modelled on the handwriting of German scribes. Gutenberg's invention was not the letter design but the system: a hand mould that cast thousands of identical metal letters, which could be arranged, printed and reused. Readers of the time expected books to look handwritten, so the first typeface imitated a pen.

Garamond (1530s)

In Paris, the punchcutter Claude Garamont cut Roman (upright, non-blackletter) types in the 1530s and 1540s that set the standard for European books. Many modern "Garamonds" are revivals of his work or of later types by Jean Jannon that were long misattributed to him. Garamond's small x-height and graceful shapes make it economical and calm on a page.

Caslon (1720s)

William Caslon's types, cut in London from the 1720s, became the default of the English-speaking world for most of the 18th century. American printers used Caslon for the first printed versions of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. A popular printers' saying ran: "When in doubt, use Caslon."

Baskerville (1757)

John Baskerville, a Birmingham businessman, improved the whole system: blacker ink, smoother "wove" paper and type with sharper contrast between thick and thin strokes. His 1757 Virgil showed what the combination could do. In 2012 the filmmaker Errol Morris ran an informal online test with readers of The New York Times: statements set in Baskerville were slightly more likely to be judged true than the same statements in other fonts, including Comic Sans¹⁰. It was not a controlled study, but it is a memorable hint that typography carries authority.

Bodoni (1798)

Giambattista Bodoni, printer to the Duke of Parma, pushed contrast to the extreme: hairline serifs and heavy vertical strokes. His Manuale Tipografico, published by his widow in 1818, displayed hundreds of alphabets. Bodoni-style "Didone" types still dominate fashion magazines because high contrast looks luxurious at large sizes, and breaks up at small ones.

Akzidenz-Grotesk (1898)

The Berthold foundry in Berlin issued Akzidenz-Grotesk in 1898 for "jobbing" print: tickets, forms and advertisements. Plain and sturdy, it became the favourite of Swiss modernist designers in the 1950s and the direct ancestor of Helvetica.

Johnston (1916)

London's Underground commissioned the calligrapher Edward Johnston in 1913 to create a typeface that would be unmistakably clear on station signs. Johnston's sans-serif, first used in 1916, is still the basis of Transport for London's lettering more than a century later: the longest-running corporate typeface in continuous use. (Its signs appear again in our post on the London Tube map.)

Futura (1927)

The German designer Paul Renner built Futura from circles, triangles and squares, for the Bauer foundry in Frankfurt in 1927. It became a symbol of modernity: Volkswagen, Louis Vuitton and the plaque that Apollo 11 astronauts left on the Moon in 1969 all used it.

Gill Sans (1928)

The English sculptor Eric Gill drew Gill Sans for the Monotype Corporation in 1928, based partly on Johnston's Underground letters, which he had helped with. It is "humanist": its proportions follow classical Roman capitals rather than geometry. The BBC and the London and North Eastern Railway used it for decades.

Times New Roman (1932)

In 1929 Stanley Morison, typographic adviser to Monotype, told The Times of London that its type was badly printed and old-fashioned. The paper asked him to fix it. Morison supervised and the draughtsman Victor Lardent drew a new face based on an older Plantin type, made narrower so more words fit each column, with sharper contrast for cheap newsprint. The Times first appeared in it on 3 October 1932². Microsoft shipped it with Windows from 1992, which made it the default font of a generation of school essays and legal documents.

Helvetica (1957)

At the Haas Type Foundry near Basel, Eduard Hoffmann commissioned Max Miedinger in 1957 to update Akzidenz-Grotesk for the Swiss style then sweeping design. The result, Neue Haas Grotesk, was renamed Helvetica, from the Latin name for Switzerland, when Stempel and Linotype released it internationally in 1960⁶. Its tight spacing, horizontal stroke endings and large x-height made it feel neutral and modern. It became the voice of corporations (American Airlines, Lufthansa, Jeep), New York's subway signs and, from iOS 7 in 2013 until 2015, Apple's iPhone interface.

Frutiger (1976)

When Charles de Gaulle Airport opened outside Paris in 1974, the Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger, already famous for Univers, was asked to design its signage. He drew letters with open shapes that stayed legible at a distance, from an angle and to people walking fast. The typeface, released for general use in 1976 as Frutiger, is now one of the most common choices for hospital, transport and road signage worldwide.

Comic Sans (1994)

Vincent Connare, a typographic engineer at Microsoft, saw a beta of Microsoft Bob, a friendly home interface for beginners, in which a cartoon dog spoke in speech bubbles set in Times New Roman. It looked wrong, so in 1994 he drew a face based on the lettering in comic books he had in his office, including The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen⁵. It missed Bob's deadline but shipped with Windows 95's Plus! pack and then with Windows itself⁴, and escaped into every school poster and office notice. Connare's own view is that it was designed for one purpose and misused for many.

Verdana and Georgia (1996)

In the mid-1990s screens showed text at 72 to 96 pixels per inch, so a lowercase letter might be only seven pixels tall. Microsoft commissioned the type designer Matthew Carter to draw typefaces for exactly that grid: Verdana, a sans-serif with a large x-height, wide letters and generous spacing, and Georgia, a serif that held up on screen³. Tom Rickner hand-tuned the pixel instructions ("hinting"). Verdana became the dominant font of the early 2000s web.

Roboto, San Francisco and Inter (2011–2017)

As screens reached 300 pixels per inch and more, interface fonts could become more refined. Google introduced Roboto with Android 4.0 in 2011¹²; Apple introduced San Francisco in 2015 to replace Helvetica Neue, with separate "Text" and "Display" cuts tuned for small and large sizes; and the Swedish designer Rasmus Andersson released Inter in 2017 as a free typeface for interfaces, now used across many apps and websites¹³. India's currency got its own glyph in the same period: the rupee sign ₹, designed by D. Udaya Kumar and chosen by the Union Cabinet on 15 July 2010, was added to Unicode as U+20B9¹¹.

Reading research supports some typographic beliefs and contradicts others. Four findings matter for anyone choosing type for a product.

• Start with legibility at 12–14 pixels — test the smallest size your app uses, on a real phone, in sunlight.
• Prefer a large x-height and open shapes — letters such as a, e, c and s should stay open, not close up.
• Check confusable characters — l, I and 1, and O and 0, must be distinguishable in codes, passwords and amounts.
• Cover your scripts — if your users read Hindi, Tamil or Bengali, choose a family with matching Indic scripts (for example Noto, Mukta or Hind) rather than a Latin face with fallbacks.
• Use the system font when in doubt — San Francisco on iOS and Roboto on Android are tuned for their screens and respect users' size settings.

For a full shortlist with licences and pairings, see our guide to the best fonts for mobile apps. Typography that people struggle to read shows up as hesitation and drop-off, which is what a mobile app UX audit measures.

Dates and designers come from foundry and Microsoft Typography records, primary specimens held on Wikimedia Commons, and the designers' own accounts (for Comic Sans, Vincent Connare's). Reading research is cited from peer-reviewed journals; the Errol Morris Baskerville test is described as the informal experiment it was. Images are credited under each one. Last reviewed October 2026.