Do you know the difference between a good, bad, or brilliant design?
The science of typography is the base of all communications such as logos, newsletters, headlines in magazines, websites, ads etc. If you think about brands or companies, you will start to understand typography. A law firm might use more common or traditional lettering whereas a juice bar might use colourful creative fonts. This all adds up to create a brand that people relate to.
With the amount of content, we need to keep up with today’s digital marketing requirements even using the ultimate content hack we wrote about previously, there is still a massive adoption of services like Canva or Spark to keep costs down and to be able to roll your own content without the need of a graphic designer or hours of photoshop knowledge.
While these apps make it so easy with their templates the problems start arising when you need to customize those templates to make it fit with your branding and content. Most Graphic designers don’t just have the software knowledge, it’s design knowledge that sets them apart.
Typography plays a particularly key role in design, it gives character, it can bring about a feeling, remind you of a certain brand or create a vibe
So today I thought I would set out a few rules to follow specifically geared towards typography for your content.
- Use one font
- When in doubt align left
- Double the size
- Skip a weight
- Spacing
So, let’s get into it.
Use one font
Using two fonts requires a lot of understanding on the chosen fonts, so keep it simple and just use one font. If you really must delve into using two fonts, then avoid at all costs using two fonts of the same classification. What I mean by this is don’t use two sans serif, serif, slab serif or script faces together. Your typeface should not look out of place, it should just blend in with your company and image. This is where you need to master the basic rules of typography.
When is doubt justify/align left
Most of us in western society read left to right, so don’t make things harder than they already need to be by doing some artistic right justification just because you think it looks cool. Keep things as simple as possible.
Double the size
Double your point size. If your body text is 16px in size make your header text 32px. If doubling doesn’t look enough try x3 or x4 of your body font size.
Skip a weight
Go from medium to extra bold or light to bold. Design is all about contrast so skip a weight and you automatically create contrast in your typography.
Spacing
Typography is all about spacing. Avoid having a single word on the last line. Don’t allow a new page or column to begin with the last word or line from the previous paragraph.
There you have it. Some quick tips on typography. Fonts can be beautiful and my using the tips above can make your social posts, emails or graphics stand out amongst the masses. Have fun with it.