Week 11 Page 4: Selecting the Right Typeface

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How to Select the Right Typeface

Selecting the right typeface is quite an art. There are so many considerations that go into picking the right font for the job!

Practical Considerations:
Readability and legibility should always take precedence over any other creative design ideas you might have because ultimately, the reader has to be able to read the message!

The design situation might also determine your choice of font. For example, if you need a strong headline to stand out in a page of type, your choice is likely to be a simple, bold sans serif rather than a wispy script.

Many times you need to inject a sense of "mood" or "theme" into a design. This is when picking the right typeface becomes of paramount importance.

Strategies for Picking Typefaces:
Picking the right typeface can be a time-consuming and daunting task!

  • Firstly, you have to be familiar with a wide variety of fonts.
  • Secondly, you need to have a sense of what each font communicates.

Some are pretty obvious (e.g. brush stroke font = Asian), others more subtle. However, sometimes "obvious" isn't necessarily the best choice because it can easily become cliched and overused. Also avoid overused and common (default) fonts. These make your designs appear boring and dated.

Here's a brief list of "avoid" fonts:

  • Comic Sans
  • Papyrus
  • Lucida (all)
  • Brush Script
  • Apple Chancery
  • Courier
  • Geneva

 

Let's have some fun with creative type!
Look at the numbered "mood" words in the image at the top of the page and jot down what mood, era, atmosphere each reminds you of. Post your list to our Weekly Discussion, Discoveries and Questions Forum and then see what other students thought!

 

Online Font Sites: One of your best typeface selection strategies is to go to an online font site that has a Type Previewer (such as Google Fonts or Dafont.com). If you already have the content words you need to select a typeface for, input them into the preview box and look at the results. Often it helps to limit the options by targeting specific categories of fonts. For example, if it's a "retro" vibe you're looking for, see if you can find that category listed.

Here's an example from Dafont.com...

Which of these retro fonts on Dafont.com would you pick for the book title, The Great Gatsby?
#1 would probably be my choice because it's fairly simple but still has quite thick strokes.
#2 is rather wide and too thin to stand out enough.
#3 lacks character and is too thick!

dafont retro fonts

Typeface Selection Examples:

What do you think about the typeface selection for the headings on this travel page? Appropriate?

Does the typeface selection on the site below evoke a mood or time period?

What about the type at the following site? Does the typography at this site communicate "wedding" and "romance"? If not, what vibe does it communicate and why?

Compare the above site to this one below (they have the same wedding theme). Which one do you prefer and why? Which one evokes the best wedding "mood"?

 

Typeface Selection and Atmosphere

Notice how the changes in type design at the CSS Zen Garden sites affect the atmosphere and mood of the page design. Just select a different design from the right sidebar:

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