So we’ve all seen a lot of bad uses of fonts. But then sometimes we find ourselves being the very culprits of bad font usage. Or perhaps you find yourself stuck in the rut of using the same font over and over again. While there are many great fonts out there, one should consider changing fonts for different ocassions, but also for different applications.

Now when I use the word “application” i don’t mean print, web or some other medium. I mean the particular arena in which the font will bue used. For example if you are going to use a font for a church, that may not be a good font to use for a children’s day care. Or if you are creating a website for a corporation, giving them a destroyed font may not be your choice either. It all depends on the application and audience.

With that said, here are a couple of pet peves that I’ve picked up over the years from many different sources.

Papyrus - This font just sucks. Now if you’re guilty of using it, don’t go out and hang yourself. My guess would be that most people use it because they somehow think it’s fancy, but modern. Or they want a textured looking font. So rather than find the right font and apply texture, they find Papyrus. Papyrus is technically a bad font. Poor construction. Difficult to read.

Comic Sans - There is an entire website dedicated to ridding the world of this font. I don’t particularly hate this font. However one must understand that it was created for comic book text. This font should never ever be used to typeset a book, formal paper, or aything beyond one sentence. It wasn’t made for that.

Some basic things to consider when selecting a font:Â

1. Consider your audience. I’ve seen lots of flyers targeted at a young crowd using some old traditional looking font. More often than not it’s Times New Roman. Times isn’t bad, but who’s kidding who. Times is very formal and stiff looking.
2. Legibility. Now on the other side of cold and dry fonts are overly animated/ornate looking fonts. Whether the font is destroyed looking or ultra frilly, neither is legible. People find fonts like RAGE Italic and squeeze the type together and write a whole story and some how think other people can read it. They can’t. And if people can’t read your message, you’re better off not giving it.

 Some other basics to using fonts:

1. Try to narrow your design/document down to two major fonts. Don’t go crazy using a different font for every heading. This creates a very disjoined unorganized looking design.
2. Be creative with just one font. You can use one font with bolds, different sizes, compressed, extended and even italic. One font can be used in so many different ways. Use it.
3. Use a san serif font or serif font depending on your content. San serif gives off a very clean and modern look. Serifed fonts can also be clean, however they make a document look very formal and sometimes a little rigid.

Those are just a few thoughts on fonts for now. Now go start fonting.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.