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Off-hand it looks like a GillSans

On-hand, it looks like Gill Sans. <g>

But note that if you're going to use this (or any figures designed with tabular spacing) for business stationery, fix the letterspacing between the figures.

Neil

Thank you both for the help! I'm re-creating our old business card templates, and nobody seems to have the original files.

Neil, I appreciate your advice re: letterspacing, but I'm not sure what the problem is. Wouldn't I want tabular spacing, at least on the phone numbers?

Kyle,

If you think about it for a moment, why would you want tabular figures here? Generally, reserve tabular spacing for tables, where columns of figures must align, such as in annual reports, phonebooks, pricelists, etc.

Monospaced figures are often a problem in letterhead materials as the amount of text is light, and the rivers of space are more obvious. I almost always nip and tuck spacing there, as well as in headlines and subheads, signage, advertising, packaging, displays, and anywhere else where the spacing would be readily apparent. I also try to use OS figures whenever available, and again, reserve lining figures for financial tables.

OK, that said, if you have an address that includes several phone numbers, you may have to make a judgment call. Depending upon how you design the art, the separators (hyphens, spaces, periods, etc.) may look stranger if they don't vertically align than do the figures themselves. This, of course is more of a consideration for copy that aligns right.

And if you put a gun to my head, yes, yes, I'll admit that when I'm setting many pages of text with lots of numbers buried in the copy, and I'm stuck with a font with monospaced lining figures, I'll generally ignore the "problem". But certainly not in letterhead materials.

Neil

Neil,

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. I was thinking that it might look best if the phone and fax numbers aligned. However, the example I uploaded doesn't have an extension on the phone number, which all of the final ones WILL have, which will throw off the alignment anyway.

Kyle

Like fine art, sometimes the best rule is to just use your eye for the most effective solution.

Neil

On that particular card, I'd manually adjust the spacing on the two 
phone numbers so that they remained in alignment, but center the "-" 
between the 5 and the one, closed up the space between the 1 and the 
2, and somehow optically balance the remainder. The "200" looks much 
wider than the "201" - mainly because it IS.  As Neil said, the eye is 
probably the best measure.

  - Herb

I agree with Herb on this...

Unfortunately, Gill Sans does not have a top serif on the figure 1, so the gap is exacerbated. Maybe another font should be considered...

If you want to get fussier, the parentheses appear to be drooping along side the lining figures. I'd be tempted to shorten them to align optically with the baseline, or use another device, such as a hyphen or space. In additon, the @ appears oversize.

Again, when you're doing projects like this where there is little copy, and the copy counts a lot towards the overall look and feel, EVERYthing just stands out.

Neil

Great, thanks Herb and Neil. After looking at this again, I definitely agree with Herb's comments.

Unfortunately, I can't change the font...I'm stuck with Gill Sans. Not by my choice.

> I'd be tempted to shorten them to align optically with the baseline, or use another device, such as a hyphen or space.

A hyphen won't help much, as you can see by the one already there. In Type 1 and TT fonts, hyphens and parentheses are usually designed to work with lowercase letters; with uppercase letters (or lining figures), they sit too low and you need to play around with baseline shift. In OT fonts, hyphens and parentheses can be set to automatically adjust when you use an all caps setting.

Dominic,

The hyphen isn't my favorite separator device for phone numbers. But, it isn't as bad as the parentheses. I agree that the parens should center on the lining figures, but I'm not crazy about them sticking out above and below the flow of the adjacent characters with baseline shift alone. In thinking about how I usually set phone numbers, it is generally with spaces or periods throughout. Second choice is hyphens throughout.

I don't know the convention in New Zealand, but in the States, the most common sequence is parens around the area code followed by a space, then a hyphen between the exchange and the 4-digit local number: (212) 555-1234. Yes, like UPC codes, legal boilerplate, and full Web addresses, it's ugly.

Neil

Ugly, but easy to read, and the way people are used to seeing phone numbers, and after all, besides looking "good" the only real reason to give someone a business card is for them to call you.
If people have to search, decipher, squint to make out the numbers the likliehood is that they'll move onto the next card. Probably Joe Shmoe's card, the one he paid $20 bucks for 500 of, in 12 pt Times new roman... but very easy to read. People have a tendency to read a memorize in small sets 2-3 or 4, the separation of phone numbers into blocks actually visually encourages memorization.
I'm not saying there isn't a happy medium, a better design will grab attention, look more professional, inspire more confidence, get your card picked out of a stack, or kept in a wallet. But, in my line of work, I all too often run into the beautifully designed cards, that use great negative and positive space, that "look" splish-splash bang-on clean as a piece of "art", BUT you need a magnifying glass to read the information on them. "Is that a 9 or a 4....?"
So I guess all I'm saying is that it's important to be a little Bauhaus in your design of business cards, function first.

I don't know about that Neil. A few years ago I would have agreed but 
I'm seeing more period or spaces now and I personally haven't designed 
anything with parenthesis around the area code in years.

In the same regard, I would never give anyone a 7 digit phone number 
anymore and so the area code isn't really extra info, it's an integral 
part of the phone number.

Okay, I'll stop now since this is way OT.

Bob

One last point...

If you're in a business with international connections, you also add international access information to your phone numbers, or a "+" as an indicator.

Periods and spaces (and occasionally hyphens) are what I tend to use as separators, not parentheses. And I don't think that substituting these other devices for parentheses reduces readability or causes confusion as long as you maintain standard number groupings.

But, yes, there is a tendency among designers to make type small -- sometimes too small. And it could be hard on the eyes. On the other hand, there is more information that has to be put into that 3.5"x2" space than there was a few years ago, before Website URLs, email addresses, faxes, cell phones, etc. "Calling cards" used to have just a name, title, and town or estate name.

Neil