elisp: Basic Faces
37.12.8 Basic Faces
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If your Emacs Lisp program needs to assign some faces to text, it is
often a good idea to use certain existing faces or inherit from them,
rather than defining entirely new faces. This way, if other users have
customized the basic faces to give Emacs a certain look, your program
will fit in without additional customization.
Some of the basic faces defined in Emacs are listed below. In
addition to these, you might want to make use of the Font Lock faces for
syntactic highlighting, if highlighting is not already handled by Font
Lock mode, or if some Font Lock faces are not in use. 
Faces for
Font Lock.
‘default’
The default face, whose attributes are all specified. All other
faces implicitly inherit from it: any unspecified attribute
defaults to the attribute on this face (Face Attributes).
‘bold’
‘italic’
‘bold-italic’
‘underline’
‘fixed-pitch’
‘fixed-pitch-serif’
‘variable-pitch’
These have the attributes indicated by their names (e.g., ‘bold’
has a bold ‘:weight’ attribute), with all other attributes
unspecified (and so given by ‘default’).
‘shadow’
For dimmed-out text. For example, it is used for the ignored part
of a filename in the minibuffer (Minibuffers for File Names
(emacs)Minibuffer File.).
‘link’
‘link-visited’
For clickable text buttons that send the user to a different buffer
or location.
‘highlight’
For stretches of text that should temporarily stand out. For
example, it is commonly assigned to the ‘mouse-face’ property for
cursor highlighting (Special Properties).
‘match’
‘isearch’
‘lazy-highlight’
For text matching (respectively) permanent search matches,
interactive search matches, and lazy highlighting other matches
than the current interactive one.
‘error’
‘warning’
‘success’
For text concerning errors, warnings, or successes. For example,
these are used for messages in ‘*Compilation*’ buffers.
Info Catalog
elisp: Auto Faces
elisp: Faces
elisp: Font Selection