Favorite typefaces to study or reference — or consider a model/guide?

It was a long time ago, back in the 1980s, that I first became deeply interested in the designers behind typefaces and their process. The types that most impressed and influenced me were Souvenir, Palatino and Goudy Old Style, for their unique personality and the subtlety and style of their drawing and drafting (and no doubt punch-cutting, in the case of Palatino). So: Benton/Benguiat, Zapf/Rosenberger and Goudy. But since then, what I study and reference has changed with each design I do, so I cannot really recommend anything in particular—in fact, if one is studying a genre, then study the entire genre, not just one putative exemplar.

My current project is a Garalde revival from the 17th century, so I have been looking at 20th century “Garamonds” for perspective, and to see how they have handled the characters missing from my source material.

Serif
Minion, GuardianText, Cartier, Utopia, Gentium, Brill.

Sans
Myriad, Calibri, Avenir

It probably depends a lot on what kind of typeface you want to design, and that will dictate what other similar designs you might decide to study.

These days I'm often referencing Inter, which is a pretty robust & full featured typeface: https://github.com/rsms/inter (Sans-serif)

Other ones I like to check (if I'm working on a glyph I haven't encountered before):
Playfair: https://github.com/clauseggers/Playfair (Serif)
Public Sans: https://github.com/uswds/public-sans (Sans-serif)
IBM Plex: https://github.com/IBM/plex (Multiple varieties) - good for studying international languages as well as Latin

I've linked to the Github repos for these, because you can often find the source files (usually .glyphs format) which you can open up in Glyphs and see how they're built. Many other Google Fonts are also available by searching in Github, if you want to study a particular one.

Otherwise I also suggest getting a copy of Karen Cheng's "Designing Type", 2nd Edition - which takes a deep dive into common Latin glyphs, comparing them across many well known typefaces from over the decades.

John Savard said:

Mikhail Vasilev said:

If I'd have to pick one single font,  it will be Times New Roman. As I mentioned in previous thread, the reason is its outstanding legibility and no contenders I see so far. And as its "predecessor" in this category - Century Old Style.

All right, I'm a little confused. Century Expanded could be seen as the predecessor of Times New Roman, as a very popular general typeface for body copy.

But Century Oldstyle?

Century Oldstyle is a revised take on Alexander Phemister's oldstyle typeface for Miller and Richards. I think that Alexander Phemister's original typeface is indeed worthy of study, and it was used quite widely in its day.

Century Oldstyle was important enough to get taken up by ITC, but I think that both Century Expanded and Phemister's original have it beat, so I'm suspecting a mix-up here. But, not being a professional type designer myself, I could be mistaken, and perhaps indeed Century Oldstyle really does have greater significance and merit than I suspected.

I admit I can be wrong at giving historical dates here. By "predecessor" I meant two things, firstly, Times New Roman (if beleive Wikipedia) is younger than most of Century variations. Some statements in Wikipedia are confusing for me, about which font is modelled after which and it may be opinionated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_type_family
The title at the specimen says "Century types from the ATF specimen book, 1912." From this very specimen I see that Century Oldstyle is very different, so they picking the font name using Century is confusing on its own. So I conclude Times New Roman is ca. 20 years younger than Century Oldstyle.
And secondly, if we take lowercase letters only, Times resembles Century Oldstyle much more than other fonts of that era.
Besides, I am not much into historical aspects, and only judge the look and readability of text specimen. What I see is that these two fonts stand out of the croud in this regard, and have similar features (in lowercase).
Also I don't have any idea about how many materials were printed using Century Oldstyle at the time.
Just as a matter of fact, asian fonts SimSun and MSMincho have Century Oldstyle (kind of lighter weight) as Latin set in them. And it can be seen  basically everywhere in China and in markings on goods. And it's interesting how it happened.

Mikhail Vasilev said:

Just as a matter of fact, asian fonts SimSun and MSMincho have Century Oldstyle (kind of lighter weight) as Latin set in them. And it can be seen  basically everywhere in China and in markings on goods. And it's interesting how it happened.

When referencing Times as a model, you need to be aware of some things:

• Times was designed with technical limitations, i.e. the 18 unit system of the Monotype machines (Times New), and the duplexing of Regular/Italic and Regular/Bold on Linotype machines (Times). I don't know off the top of my head if both versions share the limitations of both technologies, and if that has changed substantially in the digital versions. I assume they were digitized from photo typesetting masters, not from the original lead type.
• As the digital Times is a system font, many extensions to the glyph sets have been added by less than experienced people. But looking at the basic Latin design, as @Adam Ladd described, should be safe.

Florian Hardwig said:

U&lc, vol. 22 no. 1 lists “the complete collection of ITC typefaces as of May 22, 1995” (a year after the first two books set by Néo-Typo were published). No mention of an “ITC Century Old Style”.