How Do I Choose What Font to Use?

If you’re looking for the right font for personal correspondence, business use, logos, signs, or branding – or any other reason – picking out just the right one can be daunting. There are so many popular fonts out there, and more are available all the time.

So how do you choose?

Narrow Down the Field

Take a look at our Categories page. There are over forty options in there, with some overlap, all of which have a chosen example font showing – but there’s a lot of variety in all of them! By deciding which category your ideal font lies in, you can immediately cut out a huge percentage of fonts that aren’t appropriate right now.

A Lighter Example

Let’s take the Comic category as an example. The most famous font in this style, Comic Sans, is very popular for producing an informal, ‘fun’ style of notice at work or at home, but is one of the worst fonts ever invented. Never use this font! Please consider these instead.

Buttered Toast by Hanoded has a similar, quirky handwritten style but will stand out from all the others. Without leaving the category, though, you can find some very different styles which still carry that informal and fun tone – like Comicraft’s Bronto Burger, Scangraphic’s Flash SH, and the eye-catching HighJinkies, also by Comicraft.

Doing Business Your Way

Of course, these fonts tend to be used only for internal and ‘unofficial’ notices at work.

For something that your clients might see, there are many different options – we’ve recently looked specifically at corporate fonts and fonts for logo design, so you can pick up some specific tips there, or you can browse the serif and sans-serif categories to find traditional, businesslike designs which are still different enough to stand out.

(We’re particularly fond of Isidora by Latinotype, which is a beautiful clean font with a soft friendliness stemming from its rounded terminals.)

Complementary Fonts

Once you start browsing fonts you’ll quickly realise that having the perfect font for one thing doesn’t make it perfect for everything else.

Many of the fonts we carry are actually font families, with multiple options for style in the same overall feel – but you may also find yourself looking for a script or slab-serif font to serve as a ‘header’ font for publication, or just adding a couple of extras for variation.

If you want to maintain a unified appearance across different font styles, one of the best ways to do it is to look at the font foundry which designed your first font.

While they’ll offer many that don’t present that unified aesthetic, you know that they’re interested in that look, and there’s a good chance they’ll have tried another spin on it in another style.