Hello people!
I am a graphic design student and I would like to share with you some of the knowledge that I got regarding the basics of fonts. So let’s start!
First, I would like to quote Jeri:
‘‘Just because you can change the font, doesn’t mean you should’’
And this is one of the greatest truths ever said in HEE chat, as sometimes the fonts chosen is far from adequate for the use.
But, let’s go to the beginning: Font types.
The classification of fonts is big and the way to classify them is cause of their trace.
I won’t show you the whole classification because is not necessary for this. However, I want you to know what’s a serif, sans serif and script font.
The serif is the slight flair finishing off a stroke of a letter, making them more distinct. Here I give you an example with the serif in red.
Verdana is a sans serif font, therefore you won't find the serif that you can see in the times new roman.
Now we go with the Script font.
The script is the cursive letter that resembles handwriting.
Now we arrive to the important part.
What should you use and for what?
Not all the fonts are suitable for everything, unless you want to give people a hard time reading.
The general rule is, the more different the letters of a font are, the better the readability. Nowadays, there is the whole issue of what’s better: serif or sans serif? For long texts, is much better to use a serif font. However, there are some sans serif that can also be perfectly readable. I will tell you this though: on each type you are going to find fonts that are good and bad fonts. That’s why choosing is so difficult.
When it comes to HEE, we have a screen. For screen, sans serif are proven to be better as they adapt better to the pixel shape that is completely squared and they are faster to read. Serif fonts lose what makes them so easy to read on paper due to pixelation and reading speed drops.
Take the example of credits. How do you make credits readable?
Use sans serif font for this, ALWAYS. You want to make the credits small so the smaller the font goes, the more the pixelation will be. That’s why serif fonts are so bad for this. Arial, Verdana, Helvetica are some very good fonts for this. And please, don’t add borders or any sort of effect. Just black or white, one colour in big contrast with the background.
Regarding script fonts. Script fonts work for fantasy and such, but use them for one or two words, not more. They are terribly hard to read. They are not at all to be used on palettes - big no. It may look fancy, but understand the person using the palette is going to be using the website daily and you have to make it easy to read and script doesn’t do that.
Same goes for art shops with their price list and rules - never use script for vital information that people need to read and understand. It’s a font for decoration: stable names, one fancy short phrase - but that’s it. Decoration.
Additionally,
The same applies to the use of italic. If you write a whole paragraph in italic you are causing the same reading issue that if you were using a script font. That's why, only use italic for small sentences or words to emphasize and provide contrast. If you use it on the whole text you are not only causing an eyeshore to the person reading, but also driving the attention away from the content.
You should pay a lot more attention at how the text breaths. Like - don't put all together making it difficult to separate the different sections of your post. Leave spaces that are enough for the text to have some air, but not so big that it takes ages for the whole thing to read. See my text for example? Each paragraph tells you about a certain thing. Once that topic is done, you have a gap so you can process what you read and you can come back to it easily and read it again if needed. If I had put the text together with no spaces, everything would be harder to find and more tedious to read.
So that's basically it. I hope this helped :D
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