Choosing the Right Font for your brand to Shine Online
The Art of Web Presence Optimization: Choosing the Right Font Online
Choosing the right font for your brand online is an essential, sometimes crucial, part of the creative process. This decision can even determine the success or failure of an entire project.
For example, do you think Obama’s famous 2007-2008 presidential campaign (the iconic “Yes we can!”) would have been as successful without the Gotham font?
Choosing the Right Font for your brand Online: What is Your Goal?
The first step in choosing the right font online is to form a clear and defined idea in your mind about the reaction you want to evoke in the reader or customer interacting with your text. Although a large part of the font selection process is extremely tied to subjective and personal choices of taste and mood to convey, there are also objective and more or less quantifiable components such as the legibility of a character and the readability of a text.
Legibility: This refers to the clarity of individual characters. It’s an objective characteristic, not linked to personal tastes. For example, decorative or calligraphic fonts don’t have good legibility because they are designed to be attractive at first glance, not for long texts. In contrast, fonts used in books, newspapers, or online articles are extremely easy to read.
Readability: This relates to the ease of reading a block of text. Factors like form, tracking, kerning, color, and other properties contribute to making a text more or less readable. For instance, you might aim for low readability if that serves an important aspect of your message, or you might want high readability if the message is complex and you need to simplify all surrounding elements.
If your goal is high readability, here are some valuable tips:
Choose Fonts Designed for Your Needs: Select fonts specifically designed for the intended use, such as long printed texts, impactful headlines, or text viewable on small displays.
Align Text Flush Left: Avoid centered or justified text if high readability is needed.
Divide into Paragraphs: Organize your text by dividing it into paragraphs.
Use Weights and Sizes Correctly: Fonts with “roman” or “regular” weight are suitable for long texts because of their medium thickness. Also, always use the correct font sizes. Many websites use text sizes that are too small!
Use Appropriate Line Spacing: If your text spans multiple lines, ensure that the line spacing is greater than the font size. Generally, about 120% of the font size is used for line spacing, but this can be adjusted as font size increases.
There Are No Good or Bad Fonts.
There are only fonts that are appropriate or inappropriate for the project.
For certain fields, one font may be more suitable than another. It’s a matter of appropriateness, which you can learn from your experience with a font and by analyzing its history and original purposes.
So, What Makes a Font Appropriate?
Design Purpose:
Knowing the precise role for which a font was initially designed by its creator is certainly one of the best ways to know how to use it.
There are some fonts about which a lot has been written or talked about and whose history cannot be pretended to be ignored. If you use famous and well-defined fonts such as Cooper Black, Comic Sans, Frutiger, Gotham, etc. in the wrong way, you are simply superficial and you get the negative effects of creating something superficial.
One way to get as much information as possible about fonts is certainly by searching for them on Google, but also, and above all, by reading books with proven usefulness.
Aesthetic Aspect: Another important factor that conditions the level of adequacy of a character is undoubtedly its external appearance, its aesthetics.
And I’m not referring to saying “beautiful”, “ugly”, “but I’m referring to the fact that the font you choose will have to conform to the aesthetic expectations of the audience with which that font will interact.
For example, if you choose the font for an insurance company, one like Vag Rounded, although excellently designed fonts, will certainly not be the most appropriate because they will not convey the right message to the potential audience of an insurance company.
Perhaps a more suitable font for the insurance sector could be an elegant serif like the Minion Pro.
Do you see the difference?
A technique to understand what the message transmitted by a font might be is to write the first words (preferably adjectives) that come to mind when looking at it. Once written, ask yourself: are these words consistent with the message I need to convey? Is this font adequate?
Humor. The mood of a font is something strongly influenced by the message that is perceived. For example, a font can convey sensations of excitement, panic or relaxation but, when reading what is actually written, the perception can go to another level and the general mood changes.
An example:
As you can see here the Vag Rounded could have more to do with the second part of the text while the Impact more with the first. It’s a question of mood conveyed by fonts. Of psychology of forms.
A tip: if you want to create something with a strong impact on the mood, try to think about the design with a totally opposite mood. If you can’t focus well on an opposite it means you haven’t focused well on the mood you want to convey through the typeface. Also because the opposite of neutral mood… is neutral mood!
Practical Tips for Choosing the Right Font Online
Plan a Hierarchy: Determine how much content you need to write and decide on the number of fonts required for different text types, such as titles, captions, and descriptive texts.
See What Others Have Done: Analyze successful projects similar to yours for inspiration. There’s no copyright on font combinations, so if you find a successful pair like Georgia + Verdana, reuse it!
Make Gradual Experiments: Choosing the right font is a significant process. Take your time and make small, gradual adjustments.
Use Font Families: If you need to use multiple fonts but want to maintain order and convey a unified “mood,” font families are for you. They include various weights and widths within a single family, like the Meta family by Erik Spiekermann or Univers by Adrian Frutiger.
Stick to Standard Combinations: When in doubt or short on time, rely on proven font combinations. Georgia (serif) + Verdana (sans serif) is one of the most used combinations in the web world.
Final Rule: Break the Rules!
Once you understand the design rules, you can break them! Knowing the rules well allows you to see which ones you can break and how. It’s also a way to stand out and make your project unique and recognizable.
