You’ve been given a new design brief and it’s detailed, brilliant, to the point and exciting. Frustration kicks in when the time consuming work on the design front begins and you’re feeling overwhelmed with the thousands of typefaces to choose from. And as if the typeface search is not enough, designers need to balance their time researching the feeling of their assignment, the audience it will reach and the story the project will convey. Will everything work together in harmony to have the desired impact?
“A font is what you use; a typeface is what you see.”
MediaLink designer, Stephanie brings us some examples of how fonts can be used and paired to express specific content. The fonts discussed are Google Fonts: free, open-source fonts, optimised for the web, though equally great for use in print projects. Moving away from Arial, Times New Roman, Futura, Helvetica and Garamond, Stephanie’s combinations below display how themes of music, fashion, storytelling and natural history take on different font pairings that narrate their content.
1. Cubano & Oswald
Cubano’s rounded personality of wide strokes and semi-condensed letterforms solidify a title. Oswald’s fantastic and versatile nature was then used to narrate a story of musical performance.
2. Special Elite & Minion Pro
Mixing that analogue flavour and vintage typewriter typeface proved an excellent choice for the title of a fashion article. The content was then provided using Minion Pro which has a classic feeling and is a highly readable typeface.
3. Amatic SC & Montserrat
A champion storytelling heading produced with Amatic SC that provides a simple but effective touch to the story tale content that follows in Montserrat. The story unfolds in an attractive body font that the reader will love to read!
4. Playfair Display & Proxima Nova
Let’s provide the reader with something serious; information that gives facts and figures. Yet this still can be produced in attractive typeface. Using a versatile serif font, Playfair Display emphasises the article’s title and maintains a sense of elegance. The body text needs to be readable and Proxima Nova does a great job of displaying paragraph text.
Image content references:
All About Blues Music: The Origins of Blues Music
NY Times Style Magazine: To Wear Makeup or Not to Wear Makeup?
Hans Christian Andersen: The Princess and the Pea
WWF Global: Blue Whale
