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.

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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?

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easy ways to improve your typography, improve your typography, how to improve your typography, type tips, typography tips, best web fonts, free font combinations
easy ways to improve your typography, improve your typography, how to improve your typography, type tips, typography tips, best web fonts, free font combinations

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?

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easy ways to improve your typography, improve your typography, how to improve your typography, type tips, typography tips, best web fonts, free font combinations

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.

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easy ways to improve your typography, improve your typography, how to improve your typography, type tips, typography tips, best web fonts, free font combinations
easy ways to improve your typography, improve your typography, how to improve your typography, type tips, typography tips, best web fonts, free font combinations

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.

About the Author

Nicte Cuevas, Principal of Nicte Creative Design, empowers mission-driven businesses through strategic design & branding. Nicte has applied this when working with Adobe Spark and Twitter Business, LinkedIn Learning, Dogs on Deployment and Purina, Girl Scouts, The Houston Zoo and The Contemporary Arts Museum. Her excellence in communication design & marketing has been recognized by multiple national / international awards, including a coveted feature in Graphic Design USA's People to Watch.

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