I recently talked about consistent design practices for a good user experience. Consistent and appropriate font usage is part of good design practices of course; and there are so many to choose from. There’s also the need to take into account which fonts are web/browser/presentation/cross-platform friendly, which fonts connote different feelings and convey a certain message; as well as how to use color, size, capitalization, and more to indicate hierarchy.

Fonts come and go in terms of popularity and usage. And now, there are different lists of font favorites based on the Google Fonts API, used in certain applications, or used in print production.

Most Popular Fonts in 2013

Here is a sampling of the lists of most popular fonts in 2013:

• According to myfonts.com, the top 10 fonts (based on revenue) for 2013 are: Trend, Quadon, Cantoni, Hurme Geometric Sans 4, Desire, Charcuterie, Brandon Text, Wishes Script, Metro Nova, and No. Seven.
• Specific to the Google Font API (which helps web browsers show more than just the basic web-standard fonts), the top 10 Google Fonts trending right now includes: Open Sans, Roboto, Oswald, Droid Sans, Lato, PT Sans, Open Sans Condensed, Source Sans Pro, Roboto Condensed, and Droid Serif.
• And even more specific, the 10 most popular fonts used in Microsoft products are: Gill Sans, Calibri, Arial, Sim Sun, Curlz MT, Times New Roman, Lucida Calligraphy Italic, Rockwell, Old English Text, and Lucida Handwriting Italic.

Now I don’t know about you all, but to me, there are so many fonts out there that it’s sometimes a little overwhelming to decide which ones to use. Even when deciding the font for my daughters’ birthday party invitations, or a flyer for a school activity, I typically resort to tried-and-true ones given the multitude of mystifying names. So, to just have a little fun to wrap this up, I present this little fun tool I ran across a long time ago that still cracks me up: Cheese or Font.

[Note: The use of the word “fun” may be debatable for some; because really, this may not make an iota of sense or be any amount of fun to people who are not in marketing, design, journalism, or some aspect of knowing about mind-numbing intricacies of font designs and names. On the other hand, someone with no knowledge of aforementioned subject matters may do well if they are per-chance connoisseurs of cheese.]

So, have it! Test your font knowledge now.