Sometimes employees who lack design skills are instructed to create pieces to influence their audience. Whether it be a flyer, social media graphics or an ad, non-designers who are responsible for these tasks should acknowledge what fonts work to make a large impact on their readers by attracting attention. Some fonts need to display a serious demeanor while others are more delicate and welcoming. Why more than one font choice? The correct balance of hierarchy can really allow one to achieve their goals on being able to reach their audience.
The following pairings will help you get acquainted with certain fonts and why they work well together:
Avenir Next with Georgia
Where this pairing works: Reports, brochures, guidelines
Why: Avenir Next is a great header font because it is very modern with its geometric letterforms. The forms are so smooth that they are easily legible. Not only is this font good for headers, but quotes or testimonials as well. Avenir is especially appealing while using tracking or leading in design (variation of spacing between characters and lines of text).
Georgia is a great font for body copy when paired with Avenir Next because its round letterforms compliments Avenir Next’s geometric letterforms and is a serif font that balances with a sans-serif font such as Avenir Next. When Georgia is italicized, it creates a beautiful emphasis and adds more quality to the font with its whimsical curves.
Alternate Gothic No. 2 D with PT Serif
Where this pairing works: News, brochures, blog, flyers
Why: Alternate Gothic No. 2 D is a counterpart to Franklin Gothic and works well as an excellent news story heading font. Its thick letters and narrow, yet large, letter height suggests a serious tone for the writer. This font is excellent for headers, but not so great for readability as body copy. That’s why a sans serif font for body copy provides a balanced contrast.
PT Serif works with body copy naturally because of its serif contrast and its humanist letterforms. They represent humanist letterforms because their origins of pen strokes from Calligraphic artists. Serif fonts are known to be legible making them great as body copy.
Adobe Caslon Pro and Futura
Where this pairing works: Web design, reports, ads
Why: Not ALWAYS does the header font have to be a sans-serif nor does the body copy have to be in a serif font. Sometimes, when used with the right amount of copy and contrast between typography, the flow of copy can be beautiful with a serif header and a sans serif body copy. For instance, Futura can be just as beautiful and modern stand alone because of its small narrow line length but with enough line height to become readable. The font is also beautiful with serif fonts like Adobe Caslon Pro because of its old-style classification of resembling organic structure of the font curves.
Highlights:
- Be aware of the fonts you use and make appropriate font choices depending on its purpose
- Go with fonts that have a decent sized font family/weights so you can emphasize certain copy with font weight variations or italics
- Humanist sans-serif fonts resemble a human holding a pen because of the calligraphic roots making these fonts feel more custom
