Which fonts should I use and which fonts should I avoid?

Fonts can express emotions just the way colours can. Some situations require using simple fonts, while in other situations, stylised fonts can be a better choice.

An appropriate font for your brand is the one that is not too complicated. It also has to match the objective and niche of your brand. For example, a bubbly font will not look good for a fashion brand that does not make products designed for children.

Here are a few features that make up the best fonts that you should use:

Use well-balanced fonts

A font that is either all the way thin or all the way thick will make parts of the letters easier to understand. A well-balanced font is one in which both the thin and the thick strokes are balanced in the letters. For example, Mulish, Roboto or Poppins have balanced strokes, arches and curves.

Font spacing or kerning

The spaces between two characters in a font matters. If the spacing between characters is too much, then it would become difficult to distinguish between words, especially when using long sentences.

The negative and positive space of good fonts is always balanced. Another point that you should be aware that space should not be affected whether you turn the font into italic or bold. Lato, Karla and Raleway are great examples of a well-spaced fonts.

Font legibility

A font isn’t necessarily boring if it is legible. The best fonts are those that make every word legible.

You can test the legibility of a font by minimising and maximising the size and writing a variety of words with different letters to check whether any letter or word is becoming illegible at a certain size. Nunito, Prompt and Merriweather are all a good examples.

Here are the fonts to avoid in your designs:

Imbalanced fonts

Fonts that should be avoided are ones with no balance. Without balance, the thick and thin lines are unevenly distributed, making the letters look weird and all over the place. Slackey is one such example of a font, although it was experimental.

Overused fonts

These are the fonts that we have used a lot for body text in documents and will look boring and have a problem standing out if used in terms of graphic design. Examples include Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica and other such fonts.

Illegible fonts

While stylised fonts look great in design, not every style would look best. One such example is the Bleeding Cowboys font with too much happening in them to follow in sentences.

Hope this helped you. If you require any other hints or tips, get in touch today.