The Ultimate Guide to Typography Choosing the Right Fonts

In almost all projects, it’s important for the typeface being used to at least support extended Latin characters, like accents and umlauts. Not being able to spell words or names because accents aren’t supported can make a project look unprofessional at best. The message of the project—whether it’s a slide deck or a brand’s visual identity—is vital to determining the best font to use. If the message is serious, the font should also be serious, and vice versa.

how to choose fonts

Notice from this moodboard, how type really influences the mood of the design. For more tips on why typography is important in design, check out this article to learn more. Not only will this practice improve your site’s design and make it easier to read, but limiting the number of fonts will make your website more accessible, too.

How to Choose a Font: 10 Expert Tips for Choosing the Perfect Font

This is our series of beautiful, inspiring collections of fonts and typefaces. These articles feature bold poster fonts, decorative scripts, and everything in-between! Find the perfect font for your next design project with one of these collections. Now that you have a main font for your design, the best way to choose a good secondary font is to make sure it’s dramatically different yet complements the design. You wouldn’t want to choose two serifs that look similar, there is no contrast and in fact, it looks like a design mistake.

how to choose fonts

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.

How to choose the best fonts for your website

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.

Do you need multiple weights – from thin to slab – with italics and bold options? On long-term projects like a brand’s visual identity, larger font families also offer more versatility. When choosing web fonts, you often have to weigh several considerations together.

Legibility and Readability3 lessons, 08:33

However, script fonts are less professional, so use these fonts sparingly unless you want to show off your brand’s creative side. While being fancy and artful, they are difficult to read in specific contexts. Choosing the perfect brand fonts for your company is as important as choosing brand colors. They establish visual hierarchy, create harmony and set the overall tone of your brand.

A font can have multiple weights, such as light, regular, semibold and bold. Choosing a font with multiple weights is crucial to building a visually appealing text hierarchy. To make it even easier for you to choose brand fonts, we’ve come up with some best practices. In order to pick the best fonts for your brand, ensure that you carefully go through the following points.

of the best website fonts

Brands use this combination to create a clean and crisp design that is easy on the eyes. The modern characteristics of the Sans Serif perfectly match the legibility and trustworthiness exuded by the Serif. We have already discussed Google Fonts, which is a massive library of open-source typefaces. They created Google Sans, a modified version of Product Sans in 2018.

how to choose fonts

So, before choosing a font, ensure you’ve clearly established your brand messaging and know what you want to get across. We’ve compiled 10 top tips from some of the best font design experts around for how to choose a font for your creative project. Want to know how to choose the perfect font for your creative projects?

How well users can read the text on your site affects how well and how quickly they comprehend the presented information. Poppins is a sans serif type family choosing fonts for website whose clean, minimalist aesthetic is based on geometric forms and perfect circles. It’s mellow, charismatic design is easy to read and incredibly versatile.

  • Fonts that are perfect for use on the web might not translate well to use in print, and vice versa.
  • Slab serif fonts (or slab fonts) are a subset of serifs with unique slab features.
  • On the bright side, whomever you hire will probably handle many of the concerns listed in this guide.
  • Your typefaces should have distinct letters, not be cluttered and take kerning into account (amount of space between individual characters of a font).

Serifs are the most traditional font types that symbolize class and heritage, making them ideal for brands looking to build an established brand identity. Fortunately, there are some timeless rules you can follow when deciding how to pick a font. 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. One of your top priorities (if not the top priority) when selecting a font should be legibility. There’s only so much you can clearly communicate through images.

As a general rule, choosing a newer release means it won’t be in widespread use—at least not yet. Once you’ve chosen your website fonts, you’ll need to decide on different letter sizes for large titles, subtitles and paragraph text. Apart from font size, additional factors that impact a font’s visual weight include stylistic components like bold, italic or underlining, as well as lettering.

how to choose fonts