Why Fonts & Type Matters

Type matters in an era of consolidating type foundry’s, digital design and Google Fonts, we’re seeing eroding emphasis on the importance of type. More and more, design is taking a ‘good enough’ approach versus taking the time to craft graphical arts, and the first casualty is type. Now I’ll admit, type was never my favorite as a junior designer – it’s complex, there are hundreds of thousands of typefaces, it requires patience and skill to really typeset. As my career evolved, typesetting became my favorite element, because it is hard, and choosing the right type for the right job helped elevate my art direction into new heights of style and quality.

Words are where the viewer’s eyes immediately go to on a design. It is the information that they want to know and look to learn. With the wrong font, your message can be thrown off. Just like the lack of emotion, tone emphasis, intonation, etc… in text messages, the wrong font can send the wrong message in a design.

For example:

The right fonts makes the message.

With Google Fonts consolidating the selection of fonts, and designers choosing to stick with what is known versus experimenting with fonts, we might see a future where Lato, Roboto, Raleway and Oswald are the only typefaces we need. the best designers take the time to find the right type combinations, and sweat the small stuff to create the best creative piece for their clients. Adobe has tried to stay at the forefront of this, by adding in collections to it’s TypeKit. Designers can now select a package of complimenting fonts and typefaces for use in projects – which means less hunting around for the right combo.

Art Directors can also look to the incredible type blogs out there showing beautiful pairs, and suggestions on how to use them together. Some of our favorites are: Typewolf, FontPair and FontJoy.

As creative leaders, let’s not let that happen, let’s remember why type matters and give it it’s time to shine in all of our work.