What do your sans serif fonts say about you
Tuesday’s Design Tip for Graphic Designers
I’ve often written that fonts should “speak” or set the tone for your piece. But what does that mean? How exactly do fonts do this and what should they be saying?
When you see a sans serif font, it immediately gives a more modern or contemporary feel to your piece.
Conventional graphics wisdom has always been that due to their lack of serifs, legibility decreases when you use sans serif fonts for things like body text. So, sans serifs were only used for short bursts of text like headlines, subheads and captions. Then they were paired with a serif font for body text.
Classic sans serif fonts and what image they project:
- Akzidenz Grotesk: Strength, force, persistence
- Arial: traditional, better for informational use than storytelling
- Avant Garde: geometric, crisp and clean (can be used for headlines and body text), very contemporary
- Comic sans: playful, comical, informal feel
- Eurostile: boxy, squarish with rounded corners (great for industrial, machinery, technology, and interior design fields)
- Franklin Gothic: Versatile and highly legible, used frequently in newspapers and advertising agencies
- Frutiger: Warmer, friendly, easy to read, attention grabber, universal (good for display and body text)
- Futura: Slightly geometric, strength, no-nonsense elegant and practical
- Gill Sans: more of a classical font, good for both body copy and headlines
- Helvetica: easy to read, straightforward, unpretentious, good for various layouts
- Impact: thick, strong, heavy, condensed font used for headlines
- Lucida Sans: clean, easy to read, powerful (excellent in business and newsletters)
- Myriad: Modern yet traditional, warm and readable (good for both display and body texts)
- Optima: Classy, elegant and easy to read, looks almost calligraphic (good for headlines and body text)
- Stone Sans: modern humanist font (great for books, business, newsletters and packaging)
- Tahoma: sleek, highly readable, clean look
- Tekton: Informal, youthful, architectural look (looks handwritten)
- Trebuchet MS: great font for the web, large x-height, excellent for viewing on the screen
- Univers: Highly legible, can be mixed very successfully, good for any purpose
- Verdana: great for displaying on the monitor (like in websites). Appears cluncky at larger font sizes.
C O N C L U S I O N
Within all these, you have different weights available for these: normal, condensed or narrow, expanded, heavy or black. These too can set the tone.
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