What are Font Pairings?
Font pairings involves choosing 2 or more fonts that work well together that represents you or your brand. The more fonts you choose, the harder it will be to find ones that will work in harmony. Keeping the number of fonts to a minimum will keep things clean and consistent with your brand. Successful font pairings are harmonious, yet contrast each other, but do not conflict. Here are some tips, what to do and what not to do when looking at font pairings and font types, groups and styles for your business and brand.
Why It’s Critical to Use the Right Fonts
- ease of readability
- online on various devices
- offline such as print material
- size of print: right fonts styles are easy to read whether they are printed large or small
- using the wrong font pairings for your ideal customer can turn away sales
Picture This…
- you are in the business of inventing recipes for seniors that are healthy and affordable
- your recipes are available on your website with a print feature to print an individual recipe
- for a fee, your ideal customer can buy a recipe book containing 365 healthy, easy to make and affordable recipes that have never been published on the website.
- here is a sample of the font pairing for your headline and sub-topic
- your ideal customers are seniors, which would you pick for your website?
Branding
It’s a no-brainer when marketing new products or services when your branding strategy is in place. The font styles are already decided on as part of your branding so font pairing is so much easier and…
- you look more professional and put together
- your website and print materials are easier to read and not a mish mash of a whole bunch of different font pairings, styles and colours
- this makes your online and offline content scannable and visually appealing
- choose a font family with various styles
- one font family can have bold, italic, upper case, which can all be used to enhance headings, sub-headings, keywords of interest all without choosing a completely new font
- connect with your ideal customers the right way
Do These Font Styles Match the Brand?
Typeface Groupings
Here is a summary listing of various groupings with the more popular ones in the graphic below.
- Serif – has little tails at each end of the character stroke
Such as: PT Serif, Time New Roman and Expo Serif Pro - Slab Serif – thick, block like serif characters
Such as: Museo Slab, Abril Text and Justice Pro - San Serif – does not have any tails at each end of the character stroke.
Such as: Helveticish, Arial, Verdana and Industry - Decorative – ornamental and artistic.
Such as: Outlaw, Cabin Sketch, Discourse and Almaq Rough - Monospaced – fixed width characters, similar to a typewriter
Such as: Courier, Source Code Pro and Letter Gothic Std - Script – calligraphy or free flowing.
Such as: Brush Script Std, Vatican and Lush Script - Blackletter – Old English or Gothic characters
Such as: Givry, Cabazon and Metalista Web - Handwritten – as it’s written, it resembles handwritten or handmade type
Such as: Classic Comic, Tekton Pro, Felt Tip Roman and Uppercut Angle
PT Sans and Lato
Although they go well together, they are very similar. Opt to look for font style that compliment, yet contrasts in a way that connects with your ideal customers.
Droid Serif and Open Sans
Droid Serif is a light straight up serif font. Open Sans is nice, crisp and clean. Perfect for body text on a web page.
Montserrat and Sifonn
These two (san serif) combinations show some strength in their statement, but not so overpowering that they couldn’t be used on something more feminine.
Roboto and Roboto Condensed
These two fonts being in the same font family naturally work well together. Using different variations of that family allows you to enhance your text without adding a whole bunch of fonts to your library.
Lato and Merriweather
Lato is a san serif font and Merriweather is a serif font. They both work very nicely together.
Berkshire Swash and Raleway
With the right brand and right target, a heavy script styles font such as Berkshire Swash works well as a headline or title and a softer font like Raleway for a sub topics or taglines.
Here’s a Scenario
You are in need of a personal injury lawyer, you were handed two business cards and had to call one.
Who would you call?
Who would you call if you were looking to buy high-end skincare products?
Let me know what your own personal favourites are for font pairings or what your one go-to font is.
Share in the comments below.
So appreciate this blog. So helpful and I’m saving it. Some I’ve known and have used some of these pairings. The examples are great especially since I am a visual learner.
Glad you enjoyed it Roz!!!
When my website was first set up, I didn’t have a clue about fonts, and trusted the designer and his team but fortunately it worked out well. The designer was also the creative head for one of the biggest media companies in India and captured the formal nature of my business.
I did learn a bit about fonts much later and even asked my new IT support company a few years later if we could increase the font size but apparently that would have then involved a lot of work fixing each and every page etc.
Knowledge is power though and I put it to use when I created my Mom’s website. I’m going to have to pin this for future reference.
If your website runs with a “stylesheet”, it just needs to be changed there and all your pages are updated automatically. Otherwise, yes, you’d have to update each page.
Glad your using that knowledge for your Mom’s website!
Personally I prefer sans serif fonts and I guess my go to is often Arial. A lot of people use Calibri and I like that one as well. I’ve been experimenting in the graphics I design with some new fonts and like the clean uncluttered look. My website has an embedded font and isn’t easy to change size without disrupting the entire site apparently. I don’t have a lot of choices in my blog to change fonts so for now, am using the overall design, including fonts, that my graphic designer created for me when we did my newest website. I enjoyed reading and seeing the pairings you featured, as it gives some new font ideas to try in designing graphics. I generally go by my visual eye as to want works. What is clean and easy to read and compliments the quote and graphic. Appreciate the insights in this post Joe/Gisele!
Glad you enjoyed this Beverly. With technology now, you can have access to a wide variety of fonts using Google Fonts and since the font is on a Content Delivery Network, it won’t put any load on your website and you won’t have to worry about the user having the same font on their system.
Good blog Gisele – I think a lot of us forget that people are making judgments about our businesses based not only on the words we use, but the typeface that appears before them. Great examples to underscore the importance of good font choices. Like Beverley, I tend to stick with calibri and arial.
Hi Deb, thanks!!!
Calibri is a very simple font, same as Arial. I’ve seen posts online though about issues with Calibri. So if you run into an issue, you’ll find tons of stuff online about it.
I for one push against Microsoft for forcing users to use Calibri as a default font. Arial is a great choice for documents and a webpage when you don’t have the ability to use Google Fonts. They should have left things alone.
Very informative blog. This confirms the importance of being detail oriented down to the fo t we choose to reach our target audience. My go to font is usually Times New Roman because it’s easy to read.
Glad you enjoyed it Sharise!