So Many Fonts To Choose From..!!!

Your boss gives you the assignment to write an eye-catching effective advertisement for the newest online casino website that just went live. There are so many fonts to choose from. How do you decide?

Did you ever wonder about the world of fonts? Here is a summary of the major categories of fonts and what they are used for.

• Best Sites To Download Free Fonts
• The Guideline To Create Your Own Font

Oldstyle

The first typefaces were based on the handwriting of scribes, and are called “oldstyle”. Imagine wedge tipped pens held in the hand while looking carefully at the letter shapes. Oldstyles always have serifs, and the serifs on the lowercase letters are always at an angle. They also always have a curve where they meet the stem.

Because of the pen that was used in traditional writing, all of the curved strokes in the letterforms have a transition from thick to thin, technically called the “thick/thin” transition.

If you are setting a lot of types that you want people to actually read, choose an oldstyle.

Examples: Goudy, Palatino, Times, Bell, Sabon, and Garamond

Modern

But as history marched forward, the structure of type changed. In the 1700s, smoother paper, more sophisticated printing techniques, and a general increase in mechanical devices led to type becoming mechanical as well. Modern typefaces had serifs, but the Serifs are now horizontal instead of slanted, and they are very thin. The stress is perfectly vertical. Modern fonts tend to have a cold, elegant look.

Modern typefaces have a striking appearance, especially when the font is set very large in size. Because of their strong thick/thin transitions, most modern fonts are not a good choice for an extended amount of body text.

Examples: Bodani, Didot, Walbaum, and Modern No. 20

Slab Serif

Along with the industrial revolution, came a new concept: advertising. In advertising, fonts are really big. A slab serif font has little or no thick/thin transition.

Slab serifs are often used in children’s books, because of their clean, straightforward look.

Examples: Clarendon, Memphis, New Century Schoolbook, and Diverda Light

Sans Serif

The word “sans” means without in French. So a sans serif typeface is a typeface without serifs on the end of the strokes. San serif fonts did not become popular until the early part of the twentieth century.

San serif typefaces are almost always “monoweight”, meaning there is virtually no visible thick/thin transition in the strokes. The letterforms are the same thickness all the way around.

Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana are sans serif fonts that were specifically designed for screen reading, not printing. In order to make a sans serif font good for printing is to invest in a sans serif family that includes a strong, heavy, blackface.

Examples: Brandon, Grotesque, Folio, Modernica Light, Bailey Sans, and Transat Text

Script

The script category of fonts includes typefaces that appear to have been hand-lettered with a calligraphy pen or bush. The category includes both scripts that connect and scripts that do not connect.

For obvious reasons, scripts are a decorative font and should be used sparingly.

Decorative

Decorative fonts are great. They are fun, distinctive, easy to use, etc. As with scripts, these should be used sparingly.

Monospace

A monospaced font is a font where each letter takes exactly the width. Monofaces fonts are used in a lot of text editors where columns of letters or numbers need to be lined up.

Semi Serif

In a semi serif font, it is a combination of serif and sans-serif letters. The specific design of the letters with dedicated serif is useful in avoiding mistaking letters with similar forms. It also has wider spacing that counteracts the perceived crowing effect, thus helping with reading. This font was specifically designed with dyslexic readers in mind.

Example: Easy Reading

Fallback Font

A fallback font is a reserve typeface containing symbols for as many Unicode characters as possible. When a display system encounters a character that is not part of the repertoire of any of the other fonts, a symbol from a fallback font is used instead. Typically, a fallback font will contain symbols representative of the various types of Unicode characters.

Systems that do not offer a fallback font typically display black or white rectangles, question marks, the Unicode replacement character, or nothing at all, in the place of the missing characters. Placing one or more fallback fonts at the end of a list of preferred fonts ensures that there are no missing characters.

There are four main fallback fonts.

The Unicode BMP Fallback font

This font contains a glyph for every character in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. Each glyph contains the four hexadecimal digits corresponding to the Unicode value. It was first developed for debugging purposes.

The Unicode Last Resort Font

The symbols provided by the Unicode Last Resort font place glyphs into categories based on their location in the Unicode system and provide a hint to the user about which font or script is required to view the unavailable characters. The Unicode Last Resort Font displays the same glyph for many different Unicode characters.

The GNU Font

The GNU font contains a glyph for every character in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane. The characters in this font are low-resolution bitmap approximations of each glyph, which results in character renderings which are of low quality but adequate to be a distinguishable graphical representation of a given code point.

Summary

Different font families give a different feel to an article. Which font or font combination to select for a given head text and body text depends on what image and feeling you are trying to present. So play around with your fonts to get the look and feel you're going for.