If you’re anything like me and a good percentage of us here at The Cyphers Agency, we like to consider ourselves ‘font snobs’. When designing something, I can sometimes spend 10 minutes alone going through different font options until I find the right look. Fonts can make or break your creative. If you’re not a creative person however, you might not realize all the different aspects of choosing the right font. Here’s a little lesson on a few main things to focus on when using typography:
Serif vs Sans Serif
Serif’s are the decorative ends on letters, this can dress your creative up or down.
Leading and Kerning
Leading is the spaces in between the lines, kerning is the spaces in between the letters. Spacing can make your creative loud or quiet.
There’s more to just the basic font choice and spacing between letters and lines. A designer typically won’t use the same fonts in the body copy that’s used for the headline. You need to know your font families, whether you’re going for a more traditional look or your creative is more modern, keeping within the same family is important when combining everything as a whole.
This example of Myriad Pro shows how fonts look different but they’re all part of the same family.
You can go even further using contrasting elements, like larger type, bolding, drop shadows and color.
The key to all of this is to keep it tasteful, legible, and relative to your creative message Learn these tricks and you too can become a font snob.
