There are tons more! For more details on typography terminology, check out Alex’s post Crash course in typography: Know your terms.Ĭheck out some examples of successfully contrasting pairs: Remember - these are just a small selection of the ways in which typefaces can relate to one another. Different typefaces will have different angles in their axes, and those will have a significant impact on how the fonts look together.
Direction of axis: Draw an imaginary line through each letter, like the axis moving through the center of the earth. There are dozens of ways that fonts can have different shapes, take a look at the ascenders and descenders (the parts that reach up and down in a “d” or a “p”, for example), or the shoulder of the letter “n.” Some are long and lean, some are short and squat. Do they all have the exact same dimensions? No – some of them are uniformly round and many are more oval than circular. Shape of character: Take a look at the “o” in ten different fonts. Weight: Some fonts have thin lines some have thick - the former is a light weight and the latter, heavy. X-height and glyph width: X-height is the height between the bottom and top of lower case letters, like “x” or “a”, and glyph width is how wide the characters are. Even if your typefaces are completely dissimilar, if they share one or two of these attributes it can make the difference between a successful and failed pairing: 
The key is to find types that are different, but still have enough in common that they can work together. This is a more difficult way to pair fonts, but can often be a more original and successful method for making your type use unique. And there are tons of superfamilies around, some awesome ones include Museo, Fruitiger, and Rotis. Try one bold and one italic, part all caps and part lowercase, work with different sizes. The key to using concordance is that you should experiment with this! It doesn’t just have to be a serif and a sans-serif paired. It includes versions in Blackletter (Gothic), Handwriting, Sans Serif, Typewriter, and Calligraphy (script) - all in the same family.īecause these typefaces are designed to fit in the same family, they share key characteristics that help them work well together, which makes this the easiest way to pair fonts in a design. A famous example of this is the Lucida font.
Decorative: Rosewood, Mythos STD, BoilerplateĪ common superfamily contains typefaces that come in both serif and sans-serif format. Script: Lobster, Young Baroque, Mistral. Subcategories: Grotesque, Humanist etc. Sans-Serif: Franklin Gothic, Helvetica, Proxima Nova. 
Subcategories: Old Style, Modern, Slab etc. There are thousands of classifications for type out there, but most often they’re separated into four categories, under which there are endless subcategories: A superfamily is a typeface with multiple variations, which fall into different style categories. The way to start by picking a font superfamily. Liberation is a handy superfamily (Image by Matthew Wiebe via Unsplash) This is the simplest way of pairing fonts, because all you need to achieve concordance is one really excellent font in a couple of different styles. Below we’ll break down all 3 concepts into a set of easily followed rules for picking typefaces to pair. The designer’s main rule of thumb is to try to achieve concordant or contrasting type, but avoid conflicting type. Conflicting: 2 typefaces which are too similar to one another to work. Contrasting: 2 or more typefaces that are different but work well together. Concordance: All of the type on your design is similar, typically used to refer to the use of a single typeface in multiple fonts on a page. When you’re dealing with pairing typefaces, there are 3 types of relationships between fonts that you need to guide you through the pairing process: What’s harder is that if you want to make it to the top of the design field, you’ll need to master the art of effectively pairing typefaces. It’s easy to get distracted and select your favorite fonts at random to use in your work. The number of amazing typefaces keeps growing and growing - there are new ones debuting every single day.
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