Which typeface to use

But there are a few things designers can keep in mind to make typeface selection easier and more focused. The scope of the project or projects in which a font will be used is one of the first things designers should consider when choosing a typeface.

Designers should think through whether the typeface will be used only for digital projects or also in print. They should also think about whether the fonts will be used for a limited time or indefinitely. It can be helpful to make a list of all the potential projects a typeface will be used for at the outset of choosing a new font. Design by Alan Grynberg. Every project has a mood. Whether that mood is formal or informal, fun or serious, modern or classic, or something else entirely.

And like every project, every typeface has a mood. For example, using Comic Sans on a website for a law firm would clash. Something like Crimson Text or Helvetica would work much better.

Mood boards are a great way to evaluate how typeface choices fit within the overall mood of a design. Design by Olivia Maya. Not every typeface looks good at every weight and size.

Display fonts that look amazing in larger sizes can become illegible at smaller sizes. Typefaces that look great at small sizes in body text can sometimes look too plain or even boring when used at display sizes.

Some typefaces can look good at virtually any size, though. Roboto is one of many typefaces that can be used at both large and small sizes effectively. Fonts that are perfect for use on the web might not translate well to use in print, and vice versa. But for fonts that might be used over multiple projects, designers should make sure the font will work in every medium in which it may be used.

If the message is serious, the font should also be serious, and vice versa. The wrong font can completely derail the message a brand is trying to send. A font like Crimson Text would work much better. Readability is arguably the most important feature of a typeface. Legibility refers to how easy it is to distinguish letterforms within a font.

Readability takes that one step further and refers to how easily different words can be distinguished and read. Readability and legibility can both be impacted dramatically by the size of the font being used.

A font that looks great at 18 pixels might be illegible at 10 pixels. Font size has a significant impact on the readability of fonts. Not every website or design project will be translated into multiple languages. Not all typefaces support special characters like those that are accented , let alone alphabets like Cyrillic and Greek.

Support for multiple languages may be important when choosing a typeface for some projects. There are four basic fonts styles: serif, sans serif, display, and script. Serif fonts are often viewed as more traditional and formal though not all are. Sans serif typefaces can be seen as more modern and minimalist. Display fonts are unsuitable for use at small sizes, but their appearance varies widely.

The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the different typefaces we run across. Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories Scotch Modern, anybody? Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces that are based on strict geometric forms.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold, impersonal, boring. These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting — as clean and modern as some of them may look, they still retain something inescapably human at their root.

This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas Geometric Sans are typically designed to be as simple as possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have more detail, less consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights — after all they come from our handwriting, which is something individuated.

At their best, Humanist Sans manage to have it both ways: modern yet human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem wishy-washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate insincerity. Old Style faces at their best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional.

Examples of Old Style : Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and — especially — Garamond, which was considered so perfect at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to improve on it for a century and a half. An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional mid 18th Century and Modern late 18th century, not to be confused with mid 20th century modernism typefaces emerged as type designers experimented with making their letterforms more geometric, sharp and virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period.

In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a kind of virtuosic demonstration of contrasting thick and thin strokes — much of the development was spurred by a competition between two rival designers who cut similar faces, Bodoni and Didot.

At their best, transitional and modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst, they seem neither here nor there — too conspicuous and baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.

Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans faces that is, simple forms with relatively little contrast between thick and thin but with solid, rectangular shoes stuck on the end.

Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific — and yet often quite contradictory — associations : sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes the cowboy.

They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to express an urban character such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin , but when applied in a different context especially Clarendon they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural, vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast.

The best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to each other, they look good together because they match correspondence. Home Essentials. Photo Coasters. Fleece Blankets. Gift Tags. Wall Calendars.

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