You realize this is inviting a flame war, right?

Okay.

Univ. of California Oldstyle - Beautiful lines, light color. The "e" and "y" are my favorites. It's like Kennerley after going on a diet.
Goudy Modern - Amazing color, very vigorous modulation, good density. I'm not too excited about the capitals though.

Casting some 30pt Deepdene right now. Now those are some beautiful capitals.

You can call me the Goudy Kid

Avenir!

All the geometric charm of Futura, but much more refined. Doesn't conform to geometry so strongly that beauty is sacrficed. Good weight range. Fabulous for dislplay, acceptable for brief text. I love this font.

+ guilty pleasure : FatSlab from Chank Fonts

(Goudy *is* mighty fine, though ... so much great type out there)

Helvetica

versatile and ubiquitous

man, such a tough question, it'd be impossible for me to ever pick just one.

(With that said I'm gonna get in trouble here by agreeing with Massimo Vignelli who said "a designer should only use these 5 typefaces: Bodoni, Helvetica, Times Roman, Century and Futura.") I'd be set with those :)

Monotype Centaur

Classical and delicate. I love the CAPS, and the Italics are sexy in a rustic old-world way...Looks great using letterpress...

I have an enormous weak spot for Gill Sans.

It's so versatile and looks good in all sizes. The smaller x-height makes it more attractive than Helvetica (imo). Large family. I just love it.

My guilty pleasure is Kathleeine Font by John Martz [Robot Johnny]. Beautiful.

can we hear it for Futura, in all its forms. Very versatile.

I like Monaco for fixed-pitch (nothing wrong with
Courier or Courier New, either).

Apple Li Sung for variable pitch.

Those are both suitable screen fonts here.

Lucidasanstypewriter is good for fixed-pitch work under X11.

Optima and Palatino have their uses for rendering to hard media.
I use Optima when studying Norwegian because it works well
on-screen.

Most of the gothics are of immediate utility also.

I use a VGA ROM font lift I created for fixed-pitch work under X11,
when I take the time to install it. It most closely resembles the
original MS-DOS screen environment I cut my eye teeth on, and
I still prefer it for writing.

I'm not well-versed in typography (yet!), but I am quite fond of the Toronto font that ships with OpenOffice.

I would rather discuss which typefaces I don't like!

There are so many great faces, and how well they work really depends on context.

But If we're talking about the sheer joy of looking at a face... I go for tangled, textured display fonts like Nars {www.myfonts.com/fonts/misprinted/nars/ }, and slab serifs like Clarendon.


-amelita

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www.abecedarienne.com

I'm a newbie to Tribe, but not new to working with type.

My favorite type family (or the one I seem to wind up using the most) is Frutiger. It has a very clean, useful look as well as a friendly and colorful flair. Most of my work is in electrical sign design. Frutiger is great to use in a way-finding sign system. The Ultra-Black "95" weight is a great, and very practical choice, to use in neon-filled channel letters.

I like the natural italic weights Linotype added in FrutigerNEXT.

Hm... For the two companies I've owned myself, I chose Futura Medium/Futura Bold and Helvetica Light/Helvetica Black as the corporate faces. I like both a lot, though that's kind of like saying that I like peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches or something. I think the really clean lines allow a lot of versatility in design, don't create problems with visual compatibility with future things you can't anticipate needing to look good with, et cetera. But choosing faces which have really heavy boldfaces gives you a useful contrast, effectively a display-face if you need it, without leaving the family or going to too many different weights.

I do book jackets sometimes, and I tend to use dense, relatively clean, relatively heavily-serifed fonts more frequently for that... Bookman Bold, f'rinstance.

I do a lot of T-shirt design as well, and let myself play around a bit more with that. One of the most popular (and one which I liked a lot) used American Typewriter bold, stroked heavily to bulk it out even more, in white puffy-ink on a baby-blue shirt. The two most recent were P22 Morris Golden in tan on a dark green shirt, and Arial Rounded, again heavily stroked, in dark brown with a little bit of gold glitter, on an umber-orange shirt. T-shirts are fun because you can play with fads and trends and irony without feeling like you're burdening posterity with trivialities.

Bembo is my all time favorite. I fell in love with it when reading Thucydides for a history class and the book happened to be set in it. In response I set all of my papers for that class in Bembo, and got so accustomed to its imperious, archaic grandeur that now I look for any excuse to use it in spite of its difficult uppercase R. I’m actually tempted – shh, don’t tell – to hack up the additional glyphs that I wish I had in Bembo.

I also really like Lucida Grande for onscreen text. The fact that it cleanly supports nearly all of the Latin glyphs is a big bonus for when I’m writing linguistic papers in XeLaTeX (scripts.sil.org/xetex/), especially when I have a bunch of random diacritics in my text.

For IPA I like Charis SIL. There are only a few decent IPA-supporting fonts out there, among them Gentium, Doulos SIL, and Lucida Grande. Doulos SIL harmonizes with Times Roman quite well, but I like to differentiate IPA text from body text. Gentium is beautiful, but has a rather large body size, so it can perturbulate leading. So Charis SIL wins for me.

I really wish there was a good Palatino-based or Optima-based IPA font. And I wish that I could afford Palatino Nova.

currently: Scala/Scala Sans

classic look, modern feel, sturdy body but not overbearing; i especially like the even strokes throughout...

runners-up: Clearview, Mrs. Eaves

Peter Bilak's Fedra Family. It is a masterpiece for communication. Beautiful proportions. Complete
with Mono, Screen (screen not offered for sale any more), Display, Condensed and Text. Encoding
includes a Phonetic, Greek Polytonic, Central European, Cyrillic, Greek, Roman, Mathematical.
Available in 2 Serifs with alternate x-heights and Sans plus alternates, real italics and small caps. Lots
of weights. Opentype format.
Modern, very legible in small set text, unique (not included in any OS), expensive hence rather exclusive
and great for branding.
I have used modifications mostly of the Sans in about a dozen branding solutions. I added a few symbols
and alternate ampersand and tried rounding it for one project.
Would be complete with stencil and rounded version.

At the moment, I'm looking at "Pavane" from Type quarry for a book project. Very classical and readable. AGaramond comes second for books.

Bernhard Modern.

Optima.

Things may change according to mood (and client ;?)

I have two. For sans serif Univers Condensed because it doesn't look all that defaultish, and for serif Mrs. Eaves because I'm kind of burned out on sans fonts.

Eurostyle

futuristic, rounded-square letters.

Adobe Jenson Pro; It’s clean and has a level of versatility unlike any other typeface I have ever seen.

... avant gardes & courier 10s... clean, easy to read versatile...>Eric

Futura extended...great geometry, strong verticals and adventurous ascenders and descenders

High Tower Text...quintessential elegance...curiously both formal and informal simultaneously. (The little 'nose' on the lower case "e"...he he)

I'm a garmmond lover. I love working with serif's. Something about it's antiquity and it's clasic look. mmm *purr*

and futura or when i must use sans-serif

Myriad, it's slick and stylish... I mean, it was used for iPods... lol (even though I don't own one).
Helvetica is nice but over used so Myriad comes after it!!