What do your serif fonts say about you?
Tuesday’s Design Tip for Graphic Designers
I’m a big advocate that your fonts should set the mood and tone of your piece. Your font choice will communicate the image that you want for what you are designing.
The key to choosing an appropriate font is readability. The font you choose should be readable in all the different variations you will be using of it. If you are using the regular, bold, italics, small caps versions of it, make sure you’ve tested them all.
For this reason, we usually use serif fonts for the body type. Because of their serifs, it’s easier to make out the shapes of the letter and thus read quickly through the copy written in serif fonts.
Classic sans serif fonts and what image they project:
- Amassis: Typewritten, o
- American Typewriter: Monospaced, typewritten, old-fashioned, personal look
- Baskerville: Traditional, bookish
- Book Antigua:
- Bookman:
- Centaur: Elegant
- Century Schoolbook: Highly readable
- Charter: Strong, straightforward
- Cheltenham: no-nonsense, business-like, serious
- Clarendon: Heavier set serif font, often used in dictionaries and headlines
- Courier: Monospaced, often used in technical documents, tables, and to add a “personal touch”
- Garamond: Elegant, graceful
- Goudy: Used a lot in packaging and advertising
- Memphis: Mainly used for short text, headlines and display work (packaging, advertising, …)
- Minion: Elegant, graceful, polished, caring, upscale image
- Palatino: Graceful typeface designed to be used as a display face
- Rockwell: Strength, great for headlines and posters
- Serifa: Projects a “news”, authoritative, informative
- Stone Serif: Light-hearted, great for a variety of uses (has a sans serif counterpart)
- Times: Classic, authoritative, most often used in business
C O N C L U S I O N :
The golden rule of typography for a printed piece is to select one sans serif (for headlines, subheads, and captions) and one serif font for the body copy.
Please view our last week’s post, where we talked about classic sans serif fonts.
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