Font geeks, ahoy!
I've been devouring the website Typography for Lawyers. In my free time at work, I've been updating my templates and playing around with fonts.
When I started at this job, my boss told me to use Arial. I'll keep using that for our official work, but I can probably get away with any sans serif for internal documents, like memos I write to the boss. Obviously, I'm not going to pay for a font, so I'm trying to find something good that's already installed on my work computer.
Legal citations use a lot of italics, so I want something with real italics, not just slanted letters. At the same time, it shouldn't be too ornate. I'm using bold for emphasis, so that has to be distinguishable. Citations also have strings of letters and numbers, so the numeral 1 must be distinct from uppercase I and lowercase l, and it would be nice if those two letters were also different. Just as a matter of personal preference, I like quotation marks that bend or curve, not ones that are just straight diagonals.
That pretty much leaves me with Trebuchet or Lucida Sans. I like the tail on the lowercase l in Trebuchet, but the circular parts of the comma, apostrophe, and quotation marks look a little cartoonish, and I don't like the slanted verticals on the capital M (which I use a lot here in Michigan). Lucida Sans fixes those problems, but the italics are a bit too angular for me.
I think I was going to ask for advice, but I haven't really left much room for advice there, have I? But if you have a recommendation for a good standard (or free) font, feel free.
When I started at this job, my boss told me to use Arial. I'll keep using that for our official work, but I can probably get away with any sans serif for internal documents, like memos I write to the boss. Obviously, I'm not going to pay for a font, so I'm trying to find something good that's already installed on my work computer.
Legal citations use a lot of italics, so I want something with real italics, not just slanted letters. At the same time, it shouldn't be too ornate. I'm using bold for emphasis, so that has to be distinguishable. Citations also have strings of letters and numbers, so the numeral 1 must be distinct from uppercase I and lowercase l, and it would be nice if those two letters were also different. Just as a matter of personal preference, I like quotation marks that bend or curve, not ones that are just straight diagonals.
That pretty much leaves me with Trebuchet or Lucida Sans. I like the tail on the lowercase l in Trebuchet, but the circular parts of the comma, apostrophe, and quotation marks look a little cartoonish, and I don't like the slanted verticals on the capital M (which I use a lot here in Michigan). Lucida Sans fixes those problems, but the italics are a bit too angular for me.
I think I was going to ask for advice, but I haven't really left much room for advice there, have I? But if you have a recommendation for a good standard (or free) font, feel free.