Classic Fonts Still Used Today and How Bembo, Garamond and Bodoni Print

Claude Garamond cut type in Paris in the 1530s and 1540s, and his romans became the reference for European printing for two centuries. What you install under the name today is a revival, and which revival matters more than most designers realise.

For a long stretch, faces sold as Garamond were actually based on types cut by Jean Jannon around 1615, held by the French national printing office and misattributed. Monotype Garamond descends from that line. Adobe Garamond, drawn by Robert Slimbach in 1989, went back to Garamond's own roman and to Robert Granjon's italic, which is why its italic feels livelier than the roman it sits beside. Neither is wrong. They are different designs wearing one name, and mixing them inside a brand system produces a mismatch nobody can name but everybody notices.

The practical trait is the small x-height. Garamond puts less of its letter into the middle band and more into ascenders and descenders, so a block of it looks smaller and lighter than the same point size in almost anything modern. Set 11pt Garamond next to 11pt of a contemporary text face and the Garamond reads a full size down. On a letterhead that is a feature: it gives an airy, formal page. It is also why Garamond fails on anything read at a distance.

Its natural home is stationery. Standard letterheads start at $99.95 for a run, and a Garamond masthead with the body copy in the same family at 11pt or 12pt is the setting most law firms, publishers and consultancies have quietly used for decades. If you are building the sheet from scratch, our letterhead design tips on font size, style and format cover the margins and the alignment that go with it.

Giambattista Bodoni worked in Parma at the end of the 1700s and drove stroke contrast as far as the technology allowed. Thick stems, hairline thin strokes, a dead vertical stress, and flat unbracketed serifs that meet the stem at a sharp corner. The category name is Didone, shared with Didot in France.

On a piece of print it does something no old-style can. The eye reads the alternation of thick and thin as precision and expense, which is why fashion houses, perfume packaging and luxury mastheads have leaned on it for a century. Set large, letterspaced, in a single line across a card, Bodoni still looks like money.

Then it charges you. The hairlines are the thinnest structures in common typography, and three things kill them. Small size, because a scaled-down digital outline has no optical compensation and the hairline drops below what the press can hold. Absorbent uncoated stock, because ink wicks into the fibres and the thin stroke either fattens unevenly or breaks up. And reversed type, where ink spread from the surrounding solid closes the hairline entirely and the letters turn to mush.

The rules that follow are simple. Keep Bodoni at 12pt and above. Print it positive rather than reversed. Give it a smooth surface: a coated card, a soft-touch laminate, or the tight nap of suede business cards at $87.15, which hold a fine line better than their velvety look suggests. Use it for the name, not for the address block, and let a plain face carry the small text underneath.

Modern presses are far more accurate than a wooden hand press, so it seems backwards that type drawn for the cruder machine still performs. The reason is that ink behaves the same way it always did.

Ink spreads. On an offset press, a halftone dot prints slightly larger than it was in the file, and the same effect thickens the edge of a solid stroke. On uncoated stock the effect is much stronger, because ink soaks into open fibres and creeps sideways. Old-style faces were drawn a touch light with generous space inside the letters, which means that spread lands in space the design left for it. A face optimised for a screen, where nothing spreads, often has no such margin, and its counters fill in on cheap paper.

Two more habits help them. Bracketed serifs, the ones that curve into the stem instead of meeting it at a corner, put more material at the joint where ink pools, so the joint stays clean instead of blobbing. And old-style figures, the numerals that hop above and below the line, sit calmly in a text block instead of shouting the way lining figures do in a paragraph.

None of this rescues a bad setting. Line spacing, letter spacing and word spacing still decide whether a page is readable, and old serifs generally want a little more leading than a modern face because their ascenders and descenders are long. Our explanation of leading, kerning and tracking covers the numbers, and the serif versus sans serif comparison covers when to abandon serifs entirely.

The reliable pairings are not two classics together. They are one classic doing the reading and one neutral face doing the labelling, because the eye needs the two roles to look genuinely different rather than slightly different.

Combinations that hold up in print:

• Garamond with a humanist sans. Gill Sans, Frutiger or Source Sans handle the address block, the phone number and the small print while Garamond carries the letter.
• Bodoni with a plain grotesque. Helvetica, Univers or Inter under a Bodoni name gives the contrast that made the pairing a fashion standard, without asking the grotesque to compete.
• Bembo with itself. Roman, italic and small caps from one family cover almost any document. Small caps for the running head, italic for emphasis, and no second font at all is a legitimate answer.
• Caslon with a slab or a wood-type display face. Both come from the same press tradition, so the mix reads as period rather than accident.

Two failures repeat. The first is pairing two old-styles, say Garamond with Caslon: they are close enough that the difference looks like a mistake in the file. The second is fixing a weight problem with a bold. Bolding a delicate old-style thickens the stems while the hairlines lag behind, and the letter loses the proportion that made it worth choosing. Add size, add letterspacing, add colour, or switch to the family's own semibold if it has one.

Keep the count low. Two families and three or four styles cover a full stationery set, and consistency across the standard business cards at $17.57, the letterhead and the envelope does more for a brand than any single clever pairing. Before you send the artwork, confirm the fonts are embedded or outlined using our guide to embedding fonts in Illustrator for print, and check the license with the Google fonts commercial and print use guide.