Thu Jun 28, 2012 12:38 am
Oh, no! Don't go with Cambria, almost as bad as Ariel or Helvetica. Futura would be the best completely sans-serif font, but much better would be semi-serif fonts -- not quite true serif but not really sans-serif -- or a classic serif font.
You should be able to find Newtext for free or cheap, and if you can't then use Copperplate or Copperplate Gothic, which is similar but with small caps instead of real lower-case letters. They look far more silent-movie-like than Cambria. Cooper Black, Windsor, Bookman Oldstyle, or even things like Garamond and Caslon would be much better than Cambria.
The imitatation silent-movie-style font called Nickelodeon you might also be able to find is a bit artificial but gives a reasonable approximation of the silent-movie era flavor. As noted, Speedball and Dr Jekyll are also very reminiscent of the silent era hand-lettered title cards. An excellent font if you can find it is Parsons, another authentic font used in silent movies, especially many Harold Lloyd shorts. Back in the days of Windows 3.1, I used to have it as an EPS font on a card installed for my printer, and a while back I found it on line as a free True-type font but not quite exactly the same looking.