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:

1. Amassis: Typewritten, o
2. American Typewriter: Monospaced, typewritten, old-fashioned, personal look
3. Baskerville: Traditional, bookish
4. Book Antigua:
5. Bookman:
6. Centaur: Elegant
7. Century Schoolbook: Highly readable
8. Charter: Strong, straightforward
9. Cheltenham: no-nonsense, business-like, serious
10. Clarendon: Heavier set serif font, often used in dictionaries and headlines
11. Courier: Monospaced, often used in technical documents, tables, and to add a “personal touch”
12. Garamond: Elegant, graceful
13. Goudy: Used a lot in packaging and advertising
14. Memphis: Mainly used for short text, headlines and display work (packaging, advertising, …)
15. Minion: Elegant, graceful, polished, caring, upscale image
16. Palatino: Graceful typeface designed to be used as a display face
17. Rockwell: Strength, great for headlines and posters
18. Serifa: Projects a “news”, authoritative, informative
19. Stone Serif: Light-hearted, great for a variety of uses (has a sans serif counterpart)
20. 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.

Technorati Tags: Branding, Design Theory, Typography

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:

1. Akzidenz Grotesk: Strength, force, persistence
2. Arial: traditional, better for informational use than storytelling
3. Avant Garde: geometric, crisp and clean (can be used for headlines and body text), very contemporary
4. Comic sans: playful, comical, informal feel
5. Eurostile: boxy, squarish with rounded corners (great for industrial, machinery, technology, and interior design fields)
   
6. Franklin Gothic: Versatile and highly legible, used frequently in newspapers and advertising agencies
7. Frutiger: Warmer, friendly, easy to read, attention grabber, universal (good for display and body text)
8. Futura: Slightly geometric, strength, no-nonsense elegant and practical
9. Gill Sans: more of a classical font, good for both body copy and headlines
10. Helvetica: easy to read, straightforward, unpretentious, good for various layouts
11. Impact: thick, strong, heavy, condensed font used for headlines
12. Lucida Sans: clean, easy to read, powerful (excellent in business and newsletters)
13. Myriad: Modern yet traditional, warm and readable (good for both display and body texts)
14. Optima: Classy, elegant and easy to read, looks almost calligraphic (good for headlines and body text)
15. Stone Sans: modern humanist font (great for books, business, newsletters and packaging)
    
16. Tahoma: sleek, highly readable, clean look
    
17. Tekton: Informal, youthful, architectural look (looks handwritten)
18. Trebuchet MS: great font for the web, large x-height, excellent for viewing on the screen
19. Univers: Highly legible, can be mixed very successfully, good for any purpose
20. 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.

Technorati Tags: Design Theory, Print Design, Production, Typography

Not following typography rules will cost you readers

Tuesday’s Design Tip for Graphic Designers

Mark my words: you’ll lose readers if you don’t follow typography. The typography rules are there to make it pleasing and easy for readers to go through your layout.

Not following them makes you look amateurish.

Two ways to go wrong with typography:

1. Not following typography rules which wrote about in last week’s post and in one of my newsletters.
2. Not using the special characters that are now available on the computer (remember, we are no longer limited to the typewriter which included only the alphabet, numbers, and a few other characters).
3. Using inappropriate typefaces.

Achieving professional results through better typography:

1. Hyphens (-): used only to combine, hyphenate, and separate
2. En dashes (–): replaces the word “to”
3. Em dashes (—): separate phrases or thoughts
4. Tick marks (‘ and “): used only for measurements
5. Apostrophes (‘): for possessions, contractions, and excluding letters
6. True quotes should always be used*
7. True ellipsis (…): never three periods…
8. Copyright symbol (©): replaces “Copyright”or “Copr.”
9. Registration symbol (®): for “Federal Registration”
10. Registered symbol (™): for “Registered Trademark”

C O N C L U S I O N

Here is a two-step process where I will teach you how to effectively and correctly use typography:

1. Typography rules: last week’s post and my newsletter
2. Special characters: my newsletter will talk about how to create and use special characters from your computer (in either MAC or PC environments)
3. Typography on the web: professional punctuation and symbols, special characters of the Latin alphabet, Greek characters, and technical or mathematical characters.

F O O T N O T E S

* The American standard uses double quotes, whereas the British use single quotes

Technorati Tags: Design Theory, Marketing, Typography

How typography has changed since the typewriter

Tuesday’s Design Tip for Graphic Designers

It never ceases to amaze me that lots of people still type as if they are on the typewriter. So much so, I even wrote a newsletter on this very subject. Read all about it here.

It’s not really surprising since most people don’t get any formal design instructions, but lots have taken typing courses (myself included).

New typography rules for a new medium:

1. One space after all punctuation
2. Never use two returns after a paragraph
3. Avoid widows and orphans like the plague
4. Use line spacing at least 120% of your type size
5. Don’t expand lowercase text — it looks weird most of the time!
6. Decide and follow either American or British standards for punctuation — never mix and match
7. Use tabs and not the space bar!
8. Hang your bullets outside your text
9. Make numbers and bullets slightly smaller than your text size
10. Use “real” quotation marks
11. Use ellipsis symbol, not periods
12. Learn the proper use of hyphens, em-dashes, and en-dashes

C O N C L U S I O N

Learning to set typography correctly takes second but makes a HUGE difference in your document. It promotes professionalism, legibility and just “looks right”.

For more in-depth information, please refer to my newsletter which you can read and download here.

Technorati Tags: Tips & Techniques, Typography

Am I getting old, or do people make weird font choices?

With typography a variety of things can go wrong. You can select the wrong font, make typographical errors, and not take advantage of special characters that are now available on your computer.

However, the worst offense you can do is to select a hard to read font or make an inappropriate font choice for your piece.

Any mistake with these also creates a negative impression of you and your company. It can give the impression that you are unprofessional and don’t care about details. Your typography choice should be a reflection of you and sets the tone for your piece.

Common typography mistakes to avoid:

1. Limit your font selection to 2-3 different fonts per page. There are literally thousands of fonts that can be used. You don’t need to use them all! Using too many different fonts increases the clutter and chaos to the page.
2. Don’t use display or very decorative fonts in small sizes. These are meant to be used sparingly and in big type sizes.
3. Limit small and all caps to one sentence. You don’t want to use small caps or all caps for type that is a few lines long. You need to keep these short. It would be too difficult to read if it’s a few lines long.
4. Never space out words that are in sentence case. It rarely looks good. Small and all caps are more appropriate for this.
5. Always keep in mind the tone you are setting for the piece and choose your fonts accordingly. You don’t want a girly font for a macho magazine…

C O N C L U S I O N

The goal of any layout is for it to be read.

You want to make it as easy as possible for your audience to read your piece. You don’t want to overwhelm them nor give them the impression that it’s going to involve a lot of work to read through your piece.

The wrong font choice is an immediate turn off for your audience. Making typography mistakes decrease legibility and increases the possibility of losing your audience. That’s the last thing you want!

Technorati Tags: Design Theory, Production, Tips & Techniques, Typography

« Previous Page — Next Page »