Five heavyweights of graphic design and visual communication weigh in on that holiest of grails: the perfect typeface .

In September 2013, academics at the University of Oxford published a report detailing the likelihood that robots will take over your job. Real estate brokers, credit experts and models (upsetting, we know) are among the professions that will be thrown on the scrapheap of history. Sorry. But, on the other hand, it looks as if we’re always going to need good visual communicators – the title of “art director” is 95th least likely to succumb to the singularity, while “graphic designer” is 161st, out of 700 professions surveyed.

This isn’t surprising. As culture becomes more and more image conscious (thanks, Instagram), the people in the business of making things look good on paper (and the rest) matter all the more. And the fundamental qualities that this kind of work demands are very human ones, such as taste, wit, inventiveness, originality – just try making an algorithm that will simulate all that, humans of the future.

In tribute to the “dark art” of good graphics (as Mr Mat Maitland puts it, below), MR PORTER visited the work spaces of five accomplished designers who create within the broad field of “graphic design”. From Mr Chip Kidd (you’ve held a book whose cover he designed) to art director Mr Edwin Van Gelder, we asked each creative to nominate that most graphic-designer-y of things, a favourite font. Read on to discover which one is your type.