5 easy ways to improve your typography

There are lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of typefaces/fonts out there. Know­ing which font com­bi­na­tions are the best to use can be a daunt­ing task. Don’t wor­ry. We’ve got your back! Once you read our 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Typog­ra­phy, you will feel more con­fi­dent with how you go about choos­ing your fonts.

These 5 easy ways to improve your typog­ra­phy will boost your typo­graph­ic con­fi­dence as an entre­pre­neur. And it will save you time and MONEY. Now, before we start typ­ing away, you need to have clar­i­ty towards your mes­sage AND your brand com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Make some quick notes on how you want oth­ers to per­ceive and con­nect with your con­tent. How does your brand per­son­al­i­ty influ­ence it? Is it bold? Or enchant­ed with mag­i­cal uni­corns? Once you have defined this step you’re ready to move forward.

5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Typography

1. Use No More Than 3 Fonts

Your fonts don’t need to be a typo­graph­i­cal con­fet­ti — unless its extreme­ly inten­tion­al. Ide­al­ly, you want to stick to two fonts. The third can be used for spe­cif­ic instances, like a call to action, intro­duc­tion or word empha­sis. We explain this more in exam­ple #3. Your fonts can ben­e­fit or harm the read­ing expe­ri­ence. If peo­ple feel over­whelmed and con­fused with what they see, they won’t want to read it. So, they can miss out on the valu­able con­tent you have, just because of a font choice.

2. Keep It Easy To Read

This point is one that so many busi­ness own­ers often over­look. They become mes­mer­ized by a pret­ty font, but it can make it almost impos­si­ble to read past a cer­tain point size. These types of fonts are typ­i­cal­ly cur­sive, script or hand let­tered. If you feel you have to stop longer to read your con­tent, then you may need to recon­sid­er. To test it, try typ­ing some­thing ran­dom with that font. See if you can read it after. You can also do this test with 2 – 3 more peo­ple. And be sure to let them know what your brand is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate too!

In these exam­ples, we will treat the con­tent as if it was for social media. All you need is a short sen­tence to know if a font is easy to read. Can you tell which ones were hard­er to read?

3. Make Sure Your Font Selection Doesn’t Clash

Your fonts need to work togeth­er like a fam­i­ly — they each have unique aspects but they stick togeth­er. Choos­ing too many fonts that look the same, just make your type look off. Or even worse, you pair it with a font that makes your brand look like Jekyll and Hyde. To stay even more orga­nized, decide what fonts you will use for head­lines, call outs and body copy.  You can get more inspi­ra­tion for com­bi­na­tions over at our post with Adobe Spark on 10 Ways to Pair Fonts for Max­i­mum Impact.

In the exam­ples below you will see the dif­fer­ence between fonts that work like a fam­i­ly and those that scream help me. And remem­ber tip #2… well that also applies to this exam­ple. Which one would you say was easy to read and didn’t scream split personality?

4. Use Type Hierarchy To Your Advantage

Think of it this way, it’s the BEST sub­tle way to tell your audi­ence what you want them to read first — with­out them know­ing it. The infor­ma­tion that is the most impor­tant should be larg­er. And the type size (and pos­si­bly font) change for the less impor­tant infor­ma­tion. In the exam­ples below you can see how we cre­at­ed empha­sis on cer­tain key words. Didn’t your eye cap­ture those first? Now you can add that lit­tle sneaky trick to your typo­graph­ic knowledge.

5. Tell A Story. Not A Lecture.

Some­times we can get car­ried away want­i­ng to tell a whole lec­ture. This is espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult for copy that dis­plays in small dimen­sions or social media. You can read more about that on our 5 Com­mon Design Mis­takes on Social Media. If you want to tell your sto­ry send your audi­ence to your blog, or even do a video about it. Unless you are pro­vid­ed print­ed copies, you need to keep your con­tent brief, yet pow­er­ful. Now if you plan to use your copy on a social media post, try to keep it to a short sen­tence, if you must. Remem­ber you are com­pet­ing with thou­sands of oth­ers for atten­tion. Hav­ing too much copy can over­whelm your audi­ence and they may move on — miss­ing out on your content.

Remem­ber there is pow­er to your brand’s mes­sage. How you tell it visu­al­ly can have a huge impact on who reads it and who doesn’t. These 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Typog­ra­phy are like your new best cheat sheet. Keep this page book­marked incase you feel stuck, you can come back to these steps. The key is to make your typog­ra­phy work for your brand and not harm it. These tips will help you tell a good sto­ry visu­al­ly and verbally.