How To Choose The Right Typeface For Your Design

Are you finding difficulty in choosing the right typeface for your design? Or have you always wanted to become a professional in choosing and combining fonts? If yes, reading this article will take you a step further in achieving this goal.

As a designer that creates and sells designs, you should understand the mechanism and techniques of typography. Understanding the nuts and bolts of typography can give you a large insight into the typeface type you need to use for your design.

Making use of the wrong typeface can sometimes be disastrous. Imagine using a wrong typeface with an offensive font for a website page. The client doesn’t care about your knowledge on typefaces; all he wants is for you to provide him a good typeface that will enhance his website. This reason is a good one why you should learn how to choose the right typeface for every design as it will yield a good result and influence the user’s business.

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Right Typeface for Your Design

There are some factors you should consider when choosing the right typeface for your design. These factors are important in typography and they are;

Legibility and readability: These are important factors to consider when choosing the right typeface for your designs. Every font you use should be legible and readable. The legibility of a typeface affects the appearance of a design.

Most people use these two words interchangeably; however, they are different. Legibility is a measure of how easy it is to differentiate individual characters present in a text. Several factors determine how legible a text can be; uppercase, contrast, lowercase, etc.

On the other hand, readability is how easily a reader can detect the text on a platform or screen. Unlike legibility, readability deals with the comprehension and digestibility of the content of the text. You should combine these two factors effectively. The typeface should be legible and readable as it will enhance the appearance of the design as a whole.

Versatility: Designers often refer to typeface as a family of fonts. Some families are larger than the others with more quality fonts. Your design might need several fonts, so you should make use of a typeface with more fonts.

The typeface’s versatility is also an important factor to consider when choosing the right typeface. You should ensure you choose the typeface with several fonts to perform many functions and grace your design.

You should be familiar with the most versatile typefaces that are often referred to as ‘workhorse fonts’. Some of the fonts include Arial, Georgia, Roboto, Gothic fonts, and lots more. These typefaces are useful in times of need and can give you a befitting result.

Environment: You have to examine the environment your typeface will exist in. The environment will give you an insight into what your design has to look like. To make your design fit into the environment, you should consider the environment while choosing the typeface to use.

When speaking of the environment, we are talking about digital experience and not print. It means you have to consider the viewer of the design on a mobile device. You have to choose the typeface that will be very legible and won’t impose strain on the viewer’s eyes.

The environment will consist of various colors and designs, so you should choose the typeface that will make your design legible and appear unique. You should also not forget that a website is something that goes around the globe, so you should ensure that the letters of the typeface look good in a different language as much as it does in English.

Purpose: Before you start scanning through tons of typefaces, you should understand that typography deals with creativity. And to be creative, you need to know your purpose and work towards it. You have to know what your design is meant for. There are different typefaces for different functions, so you wouldn’t want to misplace their use.

Imagine you used a typeface that is meant for designing to create a text. It might look legible, but it won’t be as appealing as the right typeface. For example, a good typeface font to use when creating badges, tattoos, logos, etc. is the Gothic fonts, and any other font type might not come out good.

Tips for Choosing the Right Typeface for Your Design

To choose the right typeface for your design, here are helpful tips that will help you in your selection;

• The tone of the font: You have to determine what the font depicts. The font might depict a casual, official, serious, elegant, modern, etc. tone. After determining what the font tells, you can now check if it suits your design.
• Make use of serif, sans serif, and other related typefaces if you are lost: It’s normal for you to look for typefaces that suit your design and not find it. In case of this problem, you can use serif, sans serif, or other related typefaces for your design. You can also make use of Gothic fonts for the design.
• Maintain contrast, not conflict: Maintaining contrast gives the viewer a clear view. You should choose fonts that exhibit high contrast to give the viewer an excellent view.

• Combine different typefaces to give a good view: Typography is mostly about creativity. You can combine several typefaces to make your design more unique. For example, you can combine sans serif and serif typefaces together for your design.

Conclusion

As a designer, you should be familiar with several typefaces so you will be able to make an easy pick when designing at any time. And you should always ensure that your typeface fits your design.