Therefore, you need to make sure the script fonts you choose emphasize legibility as well. Companies like Coca-Cola, Instagram, Cadbury and Cadillac use script fonts. For small budgets, you might want to pick a few typefaces and then look for similar options (with smaller families) to be most cost-efficient. Or you might find that you have some flexibility to add a typeface for certain uses as long as it matches a primary brand font. What this means is that your fonts need to work equally well everywhere you want to use them including in print projects, web projects, or digital publishing. Unless you are designing a one-off element, such as a poster or event invitation, trendy or wild font options can be more trouble than they are worth in the long run.
- Choose slab font if you want to make a big splash or indicate how innovative your products and ideas are.
- You can also find web fonts to support a range of Hindic scripts like Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, and Tamil, as well as Southeast Asian languages like Thai.
- Hence, make sure your fonts are flexible enough to work well for all your marketing graphics.
- Unless you are designing a one-off element, such as a poster or event invitation, trendy or wild font options can be more trouble than they are worth in the long run.
- Keeping these tips in mind for any design project can make choosing a typeface a much smoother process.
- Also known as display fonts, decorative fonts are appealing and unique typefaces.
However, excessive use of these styles may result in an overwhelming effect and could ultimately detract from your message, so use them in moderation. When deciding which fonts to combine, you can choose from many methods. Consider that opposites can work well together by creating contrast, so perhaps you want to try a simple, serif font with a more futuristic sans serif option. You can also stick to fonts that belong to the same family, too. Since they pair well, doing so can provide consistency throughout your site. Using website templates can help make this process seamless, too.
Types of Brand Fonts & Their Personalities
Fonts like Georgia that were designed specifically for readability on low-resolution screens aren’t as well-suited to print work as a font like Book Antiqua might be. Designers should test fonts they’re considering at each size they may use those fonts to be sure they’re readable and don’t negatively impact UX. It’s important for designers to consider the mood of the project and how the typefaces they’re considering reinforce or clash with that mood. For example, using Comic Sans on a website for a law firm would clash.
Larger files and more intricate web design elements affect the speed and performance of your site. If you’re using third-party fonts from Google, for example, you can assume that these fonts will affect loading speed more than web-safe fonts. Whether it’s sophisticated and trendy or rugged and adventurous, typography design should contribute to your website’s story. Consider your website’s purpose and your overall design theme, as well as the niche that you want to attract. This well-known Google font was originally designed for a private, corporate user.
Plan for a Pair of Fonts
The more styles, characters, and scripts a font supports, the better prepared you’ll be. Still, nearly any typographic genre is fair game for large text, just as long as the feelings evoked by the typeface are appropriate for the context. This is the ideal time to use a decorative or handwritten font with swashes and very high stroke contrast like Lobster or Berkshire Swash. Try something highly geometric, retro, or even grungy if it strikes the right tone. Don’t let the name fool you—this sans serif font has a clean, block-like style with rounded edges outlining the letters.
“For a paragraph, which needs to be highly legible, you shouldn’t use something with ambiguous shapes,” says type designer Octavio Pardo. Decorative fonts like Comfortaa (shown above) can be difficult to read at length, so for long texts stick to highly legible ‘workhorse’ fonts like Alegreya or Bellefair. If using multiple fonts, choose a primary font, a secondary font and an optional accent font. You can also opt for a font family in which each font varies slightly in design but complement each other throughout the same website. This serif font has an old-school newspaper look that still works well for modern design.
Pragmatic Pixel Perfection: A Manifesto for Balancing Design Quality and Speed
This serif font uses a combination of thin and thick lines to make up each letter, adding elegant undertones to an otherwise classic design. With over 18 styles to choose from, Graphik boasts clean, elegant lines and a variety of letter widths. It suits not only for web design, but also marketing assets such as newsletters, logos and advertisements. You shouldn’t choose more than 2-3 fonts for your brand, as we have already mentioned. But even so, establishing visual hierarchy between those fonts is crucial. The combination of Serif and Sans Serif is one of the most popular ones.
You may even want to consider creating your own custom fonts to really contribute to your project’s own unique visual identity. This is especially true for brands, companies, and choosing fonts for website names trying to break into a particular market. Just like choosing a color palette, it can be easy to get carried away with all the options available to use for your design.
Brands That Developed Their Own Fonts
For example, if a brand is formal and traditional, a font like Garamond or Caslon would be a good fit. If a brand is modern and cutting edge, the designer might choose something like Roboto or Raleway. In selecting your fonts, pick ones that go with your project’s overall theme or message.
Trendy options can date a project quickly, while wild options can work for one design element and fall quite flat when translated to another design in the campaign. It’s important that all visual elements—not just typefaces—match and support the impression the brand wants to give to the public. 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. Designers should think through whether the typeface will be used only for digital projects or also in print.
We have chosen Vollkorn as the title in the logo template above and Josefin Sans as the subheading to give the design a trustworthy vibe. Thus the font has angle cuts in the ascenders, arms and curves in the collars and shoulders. Thanks to the availability of these fonts on various websites such as Google Fonts, Behance, Dribble, Dafont and many others. Before you dive in, you must understand that every font sends a different message. The font has to be licensed for all appropriate uses and work on any computers you will use for the design.
In this lesson, we will show you how to choose the right fonts. Each font has a different use, function and personality and depending on the medium and content you’ll choose a specific font. Typography is one of the most important parts of graphic design, and every element we’ve outlined in the previous lessons will affect how the audience reads a text. If you’re working with an established brand, ask for a brand guideline. Brands usually have already figured out what fonts to use as body copy and display type. If it’s an entirely new design project, choose fonts based on personality traits.
Whether you’re designing a website, an app, or a poster, you’re using type to deliver a message. A typeface is a collection of fonts while a font refers to a specific style or weight within a typeface family. But Helvetica Bold is a specific font within the Helvetica typeface family. Here’s a visual example so you can see the difference between a typeface and fonts. With the basics out of the way, you can safely move on to more complicated decisions like font pairing. Pairing can be a fairly nuanced and complicated matter, even for type experts, but that doesn’t mean it should be avoided altogether.
