Design Tip: Limit Your Fonts

Nothing adds clutter to a design like font overload!

We’ve seen it time and time again where people use too many fonts. (We’re talking 5+ fonts!).

It’s important to notice that each font adds another unique “feel” to a design. A design with too many “feels” or contradicting “feels” makes it confusing and chaotic for the viewer. Magazines are a longer, multi-page publication and can support font variety better than a business card or website. As a general rule of thumb, we say no more than 3 fonts!

One serif font. One sans-serif font. One display font. And that’s it. 

If these words sound like gibberish, let us break them down for you.

Serif fonts have little marks or “serifs” at the end of each letter. Popular serif fonts are Times, Garamond, Playfair Display, Georgia, etc.). On the other hand, we have san-serifs which are cleaner and have no “serifs” and fonts include Arial, Open Sans, Helvetica, etc.). Display fonts can be fancy, scripty, handwritten, or something else unique.

Please keep in mind, you don’t have to use 3 fonts. Instead, you can “change” fonts easily by varying cases, line-height, italics, and letterspacing. When you factor in bold and italics you already have 4 variants — which is more than enough to play with.