NEC Fonts
Garamond
For the past several years, NEC has used Garamond as a basic text-setting font for many of our printed publications (Notes magazine, Concert Calendar, catalogs, concert programs, etc.). Garamond is a classic serif font that was chosen for its high legibility and dignity of design.
We recommend that you use Garamond for anything that will appear in a public area or that the reader will return to and think of as an “official” document: brochures, flyers, postings. Of course it is simply a great font for many other uses as well: letters, white papers, etc. If you choose to use it in your routine written communications, your output will have an appearance that is consistent with the majority of NEC’s official printed publications.
The default version of Garamond available to all users of Microsoft Word is of very high quality and is very similar to the version used in our high-end publications. While Garamond exists in many variant versions, some of them hard for the untrained eye to tell apart, we do avoid use of the once-trendy ITC Garamond version.
Futura Bold Condensed
The current NEC logo is based on the font Futura Bold Condensed. This is a sans-serif font, chosen for high visual impact and compatibility with other design elements.
For compatibility in highly designed print publications, this font is also used selectively as a headline font, and other members of its font “family” are used where a designer needs to establish contrast in a complex layout, e.g. photo captions, sidebar stories.
As a sans-serif font, and one with a particularly austere drawing basis, the Futura family is not appropriate for heavy use as a text font, as it slows down the reader (this is the same quality that makes it useful as a headline font). In addition, it is not available as a default font in Word and other word processing programs. Therefore, we do NOT recommend its use by NEC staff in routine communications.
Note: For staff who are preparing simple designed documents that relate to other NEC marketing pieces, e.g. concert flyers, we have identified a reasonable font substitute that will work at all computers, using a default Word font. The basic font is Century Gothic Bold, with Character Scale set at 80%. When appropriate, we will offer pre-designed templates that incorporate this “substitute” font into their stylesheets.
General office use
While Garamond is a great font, there’s no reason for Word users to abandon their existing choice of a businesslike font when preparing letters, memos, white papers, etc.—documents that will have internal distribution and that will end up in a file folder or be disposed of quickly. Most of the other standard serif fonts, e.g. Times Roman, also rank high in legibility studies for text that must be read continuously at any length, i.e. letters, stories.
With e-mail, we recommend using simple default fonts, e.g. Arial, since no one can predict what the recipient of an e-mail will see at their browser settings.
Similarly, on the Web, the appearance of type is heavily determined by individual browser settings. Therefore, we have opted for a simple, sans-serif font on the NEC Web site and e-newsletter, set at a fairly large size.
And with internal, staff-to-staff communications—both e-mails and memos—there’s no reason to stifle individual creativity with any of the guidelines on this page. Party announcements and short, informational messages are meant to be simple, fun, and discarded after reading. No one is likely to confuse them with "official" NEC communications.