A picture is worth a thousand words . . . or are we selling words short?
When producing newsletters, brochures, and fundraising materials, designers are often working within constraints. We don’t always receive a perfect array of text, images, and graphic ideas. Maybe there are no images or photos available at all! Maybe we can’t incorporate icons or illustrations and just have the text itself to work with.
This situation isn’t as grim as it sounds: typography is one of the greatest tools at designers’ disposal, but it’s often misused or ignored altogether. When text is implemented poorly, designs can look haphazard; implemented well, simple designs (even those that don’t rely on any other elements) can look extremely professional. Everything you design, from mailings to social media posts, will benefit from good typography.
The basics of effective typography aren’t complex, but they’re worth taking the time to implement. If you want to elevate your layouts easily, here are a few tips.
Take Time to Select Fonts
All fonts convey a message. Generally, sans serifs look professional and modern, whereas serifs can look more old-fashioned and scholarly. A particular font can evoke a whole range of emotions. You should take the time to select ones that help you communicate your story.
Think of your favorite movie franchise. There is probably a very distinct font that tells you something about its themes, genre, and ambience. Star Wars has a look; its font tells you about its story. Companies make strategic font choices as well. Apple, Nike, and other brands have multiple fonts that subconsciously tell you something about their message.
If you want to read more about how brands use fonts, see “Cognitive Dissonance in Design,” where I discuss some of the issues when the messaging doesn’t match the brand.
Pair Your Fonts Well
A general rule for design is that contrast creates interest, so you should avoid homogeneity in your fonts. When you are selecting fonts, find two (three at most) that contrast well with each other. If your header is a serif, pick a sans serif for the body; if your header font is heavy, choose a light body font.
This helps the viewer recognize the different parts of your writing and the purpose they each serve. It also adds interest to very standard elements.
This approach to fonts also allows you to get creative. Maybe you’ve found one font that would be perfect to describe your brand but is too much for the body copy. Use it in your header and swap in a more standard font for the body.
Add Some Color
Color can be another great way to add contrast and build hierarchy in your design. Maybe you want to emphasize the second half of a particular sentence. You can simply bold it, or you can also change the color. That contrast will naturally direct the reader’s attention.
Use Scale as Design
Designers use changes in size to create contrast and enhance every part of a design, including text—and you should too.
For the bulk of your text, scale can help create a hierarchy of what to read. When you determine the size of your headers, sub-headers, and body copy, make sure that there is a good amount of variance between each one. Your reader will know to read the big header first, then the smaller sub-header, then the body copy, and maybe last a small footnote.
An impactful way to use scale is to transform important text into graphics, which naturally attract the reader’s eye. Take an especially crucial section of text and make it large, setting it apart from the rest of your text. To make it look like one block of design, you can tighten the line spacing. By scaling up a header, callout, or mission statement, your words can become graphic elements. No photos or illustrations needed.
White Space Is Good
White space, also known as negative space, is the area of a layout that that doesn’t have designs. Think of the margins of your page or the gap between columns of text.
While white space doesn’t necessarily count as typography, it might be one of the most important elements of layout design. I’ve seen good ideas get drowned out because the page is jam-packed with words and images and the viewer can’t absorb the content. Your design will live or die based on how you use white space.
If any of the other tips above is to be effective, you have to leave space around your text to let each element breathe. Often, we want to pack as much text on a page as possible or fill it with color, images, and drawings. We think the more, the merrier, the bigger, the better. But doing that will overwhelm your readers and keep them from digesting anything you are saying.
Rather, you should make sure there is space for each design element in your layout, typography included. We don’t want our design to compete with itself. It should complement itself and work to communicate cohesively. You can still align and group different elements, but you must take time to find the right amount of space between those elements. Look at designs you want to emulate and see how much space they are using and how they are organizing content.
There is a lot more to be said about typography—ask me and I’ll tell you!—but these tips are a good starting point. If you can implement these simple ideas into your composition, your message will shine through well-designed text.
