Creative Tips #9: Which Font is Best?

When I'm consulting with businesses about their corporate communications "look," one of the hot questions is always "Which font should we use?" In the very first Creative Tips I touched on this subject as far as saying "At least don't use the defaults" without going into much detail as to how you would decide on one.

Most companies, except for some very large ones, prefer to stick with the fonts that come with their computer, or with their Office software suite. But click on that Font drop-down arrow, and the list goes on and on. Does it matter which one you use, and how would you know? And what about headings – should they be a different typeface, or a larger version of the same one used for text?

Readability vs. Legibility

At first glance, these terms are synonymous. In fact they are not. Readability refers to how comfortable a particular typeface is to read in long passages of text, such as letters, articles or books. Legibility is the ease and speed with which words are understood by the reader. Text can be legible without being very readable. To show you what I mean, here's an example: Agency FB is a font installed with Microsoft Office. It can be effective for a headline, but would you really want to read several paragraphs of it?

I didn't think so.

The rule, then, is use legible fonts for headlines, and readable fonts for text.

What makes a font readable? Text fonts come in two flavors. Serif fonts have strokes (the lines that make up the letter forms) that vary a bit in thickness, and have little decorations called serifs at the ends of the strokes. Sans Serif ("Sans" means "without") fonts do not have serifs, and the strokes are fairly uniform in thickness.

Serif fonts, by all available study data, tend to be more readable than sans serif. Nobody has a definite explanation for this, but the studies all show that for long passages of text, or for books, sans serifs are less comfortable to read. Part of this is "glare," the uncomfortable feeling you get when your eyes have to look at deep black against stark white. Sans serif fonts, with their thicker strokes, present more contrast that serif fonts, which have thinner strokes in general and have variable thickness.

How to Pick a Font

This is a tricky question, but there are some rules of thumb. When it comes to your on-paper communications, look at the company name and logo at the top of the stationery. If you can identify the font, use it for headings (if it's a sans serif) or text (if it's a serif font) in your letters. If you don't know, and you've nobody who can tell you because the original designer is long gone, there's a terrific website called "What the Font!" (www.whatthefont.com) that provides a tool to identify it.

If your sans serif company name has skinny letter forms, try a skinny serif font for the text. Try a fat one like Bookman, for contrast. See which has a more pleasing look. In the serif/sans serif example above, the two fonts work well together, one for headings and the other for text, because of the similar proportions of their letterforms. Try for a similar match. You can even go to a website like Adobe.com, or Fonts.com to find and purchase a font that looks just right. On the Adobe website there is even a very useful "Font Finder" that lets you find fonts by application.

Avoid fonts with unusual or decorative letter shapes, always. They may be fine for invitations or headlines, but the fancier a font is, the harder it is to read.

For Creative Tips readers ONLY, you can also send me your company's logo and I'll make some suggestions. (Hint: If you're reading this, that makes you a Creative Tips reader!)

What About Emails?

So far, we've been talking about how your text looks on paper, but what happens when you send an email, or any electronic document designed to be viewed on a computer screen? The rules are reversed, for a simple but important reason.

Letters, numbers and anything else you see on your computer screen are built using fixed dots, called pixels. The word pixel was originally "picture element" until the backroom boys at IBM decided that was too much of a mouthful. The problem with pixels is that, compared with the tiny 600-to-the-inch dots that a laser printer lays down, pixels are huge. Fonts with small details like serifs or subtle differences in stroke width get butchered when they display on a computer screen at 96 pixels or so per inch. They're just hard to see. Some people compensate by using big letters, but that just looks as if you're shouting, doesn't it? It isn't going to make you look professional.

Verdana, Lucida Sans, Arial and the recent Calibri font that ships with Vista and the newer versions of Microsoft Office are all designed to be viewed on screen. One of the most elegant screen fonts is the original Mac default font created specifically for the early Macs. None of these look great on paper, but for readability on screen they're terrific.

Bonus Tip

If your clients or customers tend to be in the over-fifty age group, consider using a slightly larger point size than the default for your emails. Try 12 or 14 point, and use a font with larger open spaces in its letter forms such as Verdana or Lucida. Both make your text easier to read. DO NOT go larger than this for anything except headlines. And please don't use brightly colored text; it is uncomfortable to read and makes it look like you have nothing worth saying so you're compensating by making it gaudy.

Happy typesetting,

Alan Gilbertson
Creative Director
G&G Creative

The Creative Tips newsletter is published by G&G Creative, Tujunga, CA. More at www.gngcreative.com or on the blog.

G&G Creative specializes in graphic design, photography and copy writing for print and the web.

Copyright © 2009 Alan Gilbertson. All Rights Reserved.