Does anyone have any thoughts about using fonts for different types of information that's being displayed? For example I tend to like statistics in a mechanical typewriter looking font at smaller sizes for a table of stats. The small typewriter look seems to convey an official feeling... like it's from the paper's stocks section or from some official government document. Something like Courier New. Have any of you put a lot of thought or studied the specific font styles and sizes that should be used in specific situations and the reasons why. I know this is a huge topic, if you're too busy to really get into it, if you could just share one situation, which fonts you use for that situation, and why. This information would be extremely helpful to me so thank you for sharing.
Personally it depends completely on the site or project that I am working on. For the typewriter I would definitely agree with a courier or monospace font. Otherwise I always stay away from 'fun' fonts and try to make everything as clean and legible as possible. Some fonts look good in some situations and others dont. I really like futura for print and non-web projects. Very clean font, but it stands out from most normal fonts you see because it isn't used a lot. I like fonts like verdana and trebechet for web desing because serif fonts tend to look messy especially if they are small. san-serif fonts stay clean at just about any size and they have more consistant space between each letter. For professional and business related projects Times, Times Roman, and other serif fonts give it a more professional and official feel.
Thanks for the information. Do you usually keep the same font face throughout the entire page? Or do you usually change the font between headings, paragraphs, tabular data etc. ?
I will keep the font the same for each type of element, but I sometimes use different fonts for headers or navigation.