help with typography

[vorropohaiah]

Most decorative fonts, such as you'd find at an online repository like Dafont.com, are poorly designed and can be quite illegible.

True, I've been checking dafont and though there are some interesting fonts there, I haven't really been struck by anything as being very useful for my cartography. Do you have any other suggestions?

I wouldn't use more than three fonts in a single map. One for large labels, one for small ones, and maybe a third for cartouches. You can get some additional variety by adjusting size and color, and by using the italics variant. I prefer to let the symbols indicate what a particular feature is rather than using a different font.

even though contemporary atlases, for instance, use heavy, underline, italics etc do denote different features? though i suppose you can get quite a bit of variety with different styles from the same font family.

[Midgardsormr]

True, I've been checking dafont and though there are some interesting fonts there, I haven't really been struck by anything as being very useful for my cartography. Do you have any other suggestions?

I believe there's a thread in the Mapping Resources subforum that has links to quite a few useful fonts. I don't really have any suggestions beyond that. I have a few favorites that I tend to use a lot, and I don't really go hunting for more.

even though contemporary atlases, for instance, use heavy, underline, italics etc do denote different features? though i suppose you can get quite a bit of variety with different styles from the same font family.

Right, I meant no more than three distinct fonts, like Caslon, Garamond and Tahoma (those being fonts I use a lot and were thus the first to come to mind; I don't necessarily recommend using them together). You can usually get away with using variants like Bold, Oblique or Condensed of each of those if you need greater typographical hierarchy than you can get from just the base fonts themselves. Now that I mention it, that concept of hierarchy is a good way to think about things. If a label is of greater importance than others, then it should have some quality that makes it stand out: Size, weight or color. But don't vary those traits arbitrarily, since that will weaken the unity of the picture.