What Font Should I Use?

5 Principles for Choosing and

Using Typefaces
smashingmagazine.com/2010/12/what-font-should-i-use-five-principles-for-choosing-and-using-typefaces/

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For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be
endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and
bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories

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and recommendations. Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose
intuition, and takes years of experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for
picking and using fonts that I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be
endless choices — from normal, conventional-looking fonts to novelty candy cane fonts and
bunny fonts — with no way of understanding the options, only never-ending lists of categories
and recommendations.

Selecting the right typeface is a mixture of firm rules and loose intuition, and takes years of
experience to develop a feeling for. Here are five guidelines for picking and using fonts that
I’ve developed in the course of using and teaching typography.

Further Reading on SmashingMag:

Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Fonts, Templates, Mockups, Stock Photos &

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1. Dress For The Occasion

Many of my beginning students go about picking a font as though they were searching for new
music to listen to: they assess the personality of each face and look for something unique and
distinctive that expresses their particular aesthetic taste, perspective and personal history.
This approach is problematic, because it places too much importance on individuality.

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The most appropriate analogy for picking type. (Photo credit: Samuuraijohnny. Used under
Creative Commons license.)

For better or for worse, picking a typeface is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as
with clothing, there’s a distinction between typefaces that are expressive and stylish versus
those that are useful and appropriate to many situations, and our job is to try to find the right
balance for the occasion. While appropriateness isn’t a sexy concept, it’s the acid test that
should guide our choice of font.

My “favorite” piece of clothing is probably an outlandish pair of 70s flare bellbottoms that I
bought at a thrift store, but the reality is that these don’t make it out of my closet very often
outside of Halloween. Every designer has a few favorite fonts like this — expressive personal
favorites that we hold onto and wait for the perfect festive occasion to use. More often, I find
myself putting on the same old pair of Levis morning after morning. It’s not that I like these
better than my cherished flares, exactly… I just seem to wind up wearing them most of the
time.

Every designer has a few workhorse typefaces that are like comfortable jeans: they go with
everything, they seem to adapt to their surroundings and become more relaxed or more formal
as the occasion calls for, and they just seem to come out of the closet day after day. Usually,
these are faces that have a number of weights (Light, Regular, Bold, etc) and/or cuts (Italic,
Condensed, etc). My particular safety blankets are: Myriad, Gotham, DIN, Akzidenz Grotesk
and Interstate among the sans; Mercury, Electra and Perpetua among the serif faces.

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A large type family like Helvetica Neue can be used to express a range of voices and emotions.
Versatile and comfortable to work with, these faces are like a favorite pair of jeans for designers.

2. Know Your Families: Grouping Fonts

The clothing analogy gives us a good idea of what kind of closet we need to put together. The
next challenge is to develop some kind of structure by which we can mentally categorize the
different typefaces we run across.

Typefaces can be divided and subdivided into dozens of categories (Scotch Modern,
anybody?), but we only really need to keep track of five groups to establish a working
understanding of the majority of type being used in the present-day landscape.

The following list is not meant as a comprehensive classification of each and every category
of type (there are plenty of great sites on the web that already tackle this, such as Typedia’s
type classifications) but rather as a manageable shorthand overview of key groups. Let’s look
at two major groups without serifs (serifs being the little feet at the ends of the letterforms),
two with serifs, and one outlier (with big, boxey feet).

1. Geometric Sans

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I’m actually combining three different groups here (Geometric, Realist and Grotesk), but there
is enough in common between these groups that we can think of them as one entity for now.
Geometric Sans-Serifs are those faces that are based on strict geometric forms. The
individual letter forms of a Geometric Sans often have strokes that are all the same width and
frequently evidence a kind of “less is more” minimalism in their design.

At their best, Geometric Sans are clear, objective, modern, universal; at their worst, cold,
impersonal, boring. A classic Geometric Sans is like a beautifully designed airport: it’s
impressive, modern and useful, but we have to think twice about whether or not we’d like to live
there.

Examples of Geometric/Realist/Grotesk Sans: Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Avant Garde, Akzidenz

Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, Gotham.

2. Humanist Sans

These are Sans faces that are derived from handwriting — as clean and modern as some of
them may look, they still retain something inescapably human at their root. Compare the ’t’ in
the image above to the ’t’ in ‘Geometric’ and note how much more detail and idiosyncrasy the
Humanist ’t’ has.

This is the essence of the Humanist Sans: whereas Geometric Sans are typically designed to
be as simple as possible, the letter forms of a Humanist font generally have more detail, less
consistency, and frequently involve thinner and thicker stoke weights — after all they come
from our handwriting, which is something individuated. At their best, Humanist Sans manage
to have it both ways: modern yet human, clear yet empathetic. At their worst, they seem wishy-
washy and fake, the hand servants of corporate insincerity.
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Examples of Humanist Sans: Gill Sans, Frutiger, Myriad, Optima, Verdana.

3. Old Style

Also referred to as ‘Venetian’, these are our oldest typefaces, the result of centuries of
incremental development of our calligraphic forms. Old Style faces are marked by little
contrast between thick and thin (as the technical restrictions of the time didn’t allow for it), and
the curved letter forms tend to tilt to the left (just as calligraphy tilts). Old Style faces at their
best are classic, traditional, readable and at their worst are… well, classic and traditional.

Examples of Old Style: Jenson, Bembo, Palatino, and — especially — Garamond, which was
considered so perfect at the time of its creation that no one really tried much to improve on it
for a century and a half.

4. Transitional and Modern

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An outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, Transitional (mid 18th Century) and Modern (late
18th century, not to be confused with mid 20th century modernism) typefaces emerged as
type designers experimented with making their letterforms more geometric, sharp and
virtuosic than the unassuming faces of the Old Style period. Transitional faces marked a
modest advancement in this direction — although Baskerville, a quintessential Transitional
typeface, appeared so sharp to onlookers that people believed it could hurt one’s vision to look
at it.

In carving Modernist punches, type designers indulged in a kind of virtuosic demonstration of

contrasting thick and thin strokes — much of the development was spurred by a competition
between two rival designers who cut similar faces, Bodoni and Didot. At their best, transitional
and modern faces seem strong, stylish, dynamic. At their worst, they seem neither here nor
there — too conspicuous and baroque to be classic, too stodgy to be truly modern.

Examples of transitional typefaces: Times New Roman, Baskerville. Examples of Modern serifs:
Bodoni, Didot.

5. Slab Serifs

Also known as ‘Egyptian’ (don’t ask), the Slab Serif is a wild card that has come strongly back
into vogue in recent years. Slab Serifs usually have strokes like those of sans faces (that is,
simple forms with relatively little contrast between thick and thin) but with solid, rectangular
shoes stuck on the end. Slab Serifs are an outlier in the sense that they convey very specific —
and yet often quite contradictory — associations: sometimes the thinker, sometimes the tough
guy; sometimes the bully, sometimes the nerd; sometimes the urban sophisticate, sometimes
the cowboy.

They can convey a sense of authority, in the case of heavy versions like Rockwell, but they can
also be quite friendly, as in the recent favorite Archer. Many slab serifs seem to express an
urban character (such as Rockwell, Courier and Lubalin), but when applied in a different
context (especially Clarendon) they strongly recall the American Frontier and the kind of rural,
vernacular signage that appears in photos from this period. Slab Serifs are hard to generalize
about as a group, but their distinctive blocky serifs function something like a pair of horn-
rimmed glasses: they add a distinctive wrinkle to anything, but can easily become overly
conspicuous in the wrong surroundings.

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Examples of Slab Serifs: Clarendon, Rockwell, Courier, Lubalin Graph, Archer.

3. Don’t Be a Wimp: The Principle of Decisive Contrast

So, now that we know our families and some classic examples of each, we need to decide how
to mix and match and — most importantly — whether to mix and match at all. Most of the time,
one typeface will do, especially if it’s one of our workhorses with many different weights that
work together. If we reach a point where we want to add a second face to the mix, it’s always
good to observe this simple rule: keep it exactly the same, or change it a lot — avoid wimpy,
incremental variations.

This is a general principle of design, and its official name is correspondence and contrast. The
best way to view this rule in action is to take all the random coins you collected in your last trip
through Europe and dump them out on a table together. If you put two identical coins next to
each other, they look good together because they match (correspondence). On the other hand,
if we put a dime next to one of those big copper coins we picked up somewhere in Central
Europe, this also looks interesting because of the contrast between the two — they look
sufficiently different.

What doesn’t work so well is when put our dime next to a coin from another country that’s
almost the same size and color but slightly different. This creates an uneasy visual relationship
because it poses a question, even if we barely register it in on a conscious level — our mind
asks the question of whether these two are the same or not, and that process of asking and
wondering distracts us from simply viewing.

When we combine multiple typefaces on a design, we want them to coexist comfortably — we

don’t want to distract the viewer with the question, are these the same or not? We can start by
avoiding two different faces from within one of the five categories that we listed above all
together — two geometric sans, say Franklin and Helvetica. While not exactly alike, these two
are also not sufficiently different and therefore put our layout in that dreaded neither-here-nor-
there place.

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If we are going to throw another font into the pot along with Helvetica, much better if we use
something like Bembo, a classic Old Style face. Centuries apart in age and light years apart in
terms of inspiration, Helvetica and Bembo have enough contrast to comfortably share a page:

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just picking fonts that are very, very different — placing our
candy cane font next to, say, Garamond or Caslon does not guarantee us typographic
harmony. Often, as in the above example of Helvetica and Bembo, there’s no real explanation
for why two faces complement each other — they just do.

But if we want some principle to guide our selection, it should be this: often, two typefaces
work well together if they have one thing in common but are otherwise greatly different. This
shared common aspect can be visual (similar x-height or stroke weight) or it can be
chronological. Typefaces from the same period of time have a greater likelihood of working
well together… and if they are by the same designer, all the better.

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4. A Little Can Go a Long Way
‘Enough with all these conventional-looking fonts and rules!’ you say. ‘I need something for my
rave flyer! And my Thai restaurant menu! And my Christmas cards!’ What you’re pointing out
here is that all the faces I’ve discussed so far are ‘body typefaces’, meaning you could
conceivably set a whole menu or newspaper with any of them; in the clothing analogy
presented in part one, these are our everyday Levis. What of our Halloween flares?

Periodically, there’s a need for a font that oozes with personality, whether that personality is
warehouse party, Pad Thai or Santa Claus. And this need brings us into the vast wilderness of
Display typefaces, which includes everything from Comic Sans to our candy-cane and bunny
fonts. ‘Display’ is just another way of saying ‘do not exceed recommended dosage‘: applied
sparingly to headlines, a display font can add a well-needed dash of flavor to a design, but it
can quickly wear out its welcome if used too widely.

Time for another clothing analogy:

(Photo credit: Betsssssy. Used under Creative

Commons license.)

Betsey’s outfit works because the pink belts

acts as an accent and is offset by the down-
to-earthiness of blue jeans. But if we get
carried away and slather Betsey entirely in
pink, she might wind up looking something
like this:

(Photo credit: Phillip Leroyer). Used under

Creative Commons license.)

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Let’s call this the Pink Belt Principle of Type: display faces with lots of personality are best
used in small doses. If we apply our cool display type to every bit of text in our design, the
aesthetic appeal of the type is quickly spent
and — worse yet — our design becomes very
hard to read. Let’s say we’re designing a menu
for our favorite corner Thai place. Our client
might want us to use a ‘typically’ Asian
display face, like Sho:

So far, so good. But look what happens when we apply our prized font choice to the entire
menu:

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Enough already. Let’s try replacing some of the rank-and-file text copy with something more
neutral:

That’s better. Now that we’ve reined in the usage of our star typeface, we’ve allowed it to shine
again.

5. Rule Number Five Is ‘There Are No Rules’

Really. Look hard enough and you will find a dazzling-looking menu set entirely in a hard-to-
read display font. Or of two different Geometric Sans faces living happily together on a page
(in fact, just this week I wound up trying this on a project and was surprised to find that it hit
the spot). There are only conventions, no ironclad rules about how to use type, just as there
are no rules about how we should dress in the morning. It’s worth trying everything just to see
what happens — even wearing your Halloween flares to your court date.

In Conclusion

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Hopefully, these five principles will have given you some guidelines for how to select, apply
and mix type — and, indeed, whether to mix it at all. In the end, picking typefaces requires a
combination of understanding and intuition, and — as with any skill — demands practice. With
all the different fonts we have access to nowadays, it’s easy to forget that there’s nothing like a
classic typeface used well by somebody who knows how to use it.

Some of the best type advice I ever received came early on from my first typography teacher:
pick one typeface you like and use it over and over for months to the exclusion of all others.
While this kind of exercise can feel constraining at times, it can also serve as a useful reminder
that the quantity of available choices in the internet age is no substitute for quality.

Other Resources
You may be interested in the following articles and related resources:

Typedia Type Classifications A more extensive list of different categories and sub-
categories of typefaces than the simplified version presented in this article.
So You Need A Typeface? Useful — and humorous — flowchart for selecting type,
brought to you by Julian Hansen via Inspiration Lab.
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst Link to the Amazon.com order
page for this 1992 classic.
Best Practices of Combining Typefaces This article takes a close look at some of the
best practices for combining typefaces — as well as some blunders to avoid.

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