Did you know that the wrong font choice could make or break your project?

Choosing the wrong typeface could completely derail your design, therefore failing to connect with your audience, causing your message to fall flat.

Deciding on a typeface is not as easy and mindless as scrolling through your font library and just picking one. Each font has a different personality and conveys it’s own story. Some just fit in with your design and some will take away from your design. Your ultimate goal is to choose one that elevates your design.

Here are a couple things I keep in mind when selecting a typeface.

First thing I want to have in mind is who my audience is. Who am I communicating with? I already know the message, but I want to further drive home that message, and what better way than selecting the right typeface to get the job done. For example, legal documents. You are presumably attempting to communicate with intellectual professionals and therefore you want your message to be delivered in an equal manner. For this reason, you aren’t going to chose a script font, it is generally hard to read in large quantities and doesn’t enhance the feeling you are going for. Likewise, you aren’t going to choose comic sans (poor comic sans, always seems to get picked on for what not to do), which is very child-like and not a font that is taken seriously. You are going to select a font that is more traditional and conveys a sense of authority , like a serifed font such as Garamond or Baskerville. Fonts like these convey an air of authority and command respect, lending to the professional feeling you are trying to achieve.

The second thing I’m keeping in mind, as I touched on above, is readability. Is the font I’m about to use readable? Is it to be used as a display or as a text font? Some typefaces are meant only to be used as display fonts and therefore are meant to be used sparingly, for example, script fonts such as Lobster or Brush Script. These are not easy to read in large quantities and it is better to choose a font that is easy to read. These are known as text typefaces and generally have open spaces inside their letters, they are rhythmic and repetitive in shape and the individual letters are easily identified, allowing the reader to easily read the information without much strain on the eyes. Good examples of this, Baskerville and Raleway.

When it comes to typography, I could literally go on forever with all the things one needs to know about it. Like we could delve into the anatomy of type, but I figured I’d just start small and fill you in on the things that I keep in mind when I’m designing my projects and reveal a bit of my thought process. I hope this helps you in your designing adventures.

#inspiration #tips #typography #graphicdesign