How to help clients choose a font? Graphic designer’s job description entails a lot other than just sitting behind a computer and churning out design after design. It sometimes includes helping the clients make the right choices as far as choosing a font are concerned. Many are the times when clients make proposals that seem not to be feasible, but it is the duty of the designer to offer advice and direction in such instances to ensure the successful completion of each and every project.

How to choose a font is one such area that many designers find themselves working a lot with the clients. Knowing how to choose a font is such as an important matter in design, and it requires all the attention from both the designer and the client. The right choice will lead to a great design that will meet the goals of the project, and it will also make it easy for the designer to work faster and more efficiently.  If you don’t know how to choose a font, you will waste lot of design time since the designer has to force other design aspects to match, but with no guarantees of a stellar outcome. So how exactly can a designer help a client choose the right font?

By considering the goals of the project

The goal of the project is the first consideration on how to choose a font style. Different design projects are meant for different purposes, and they are also targeting varied audiences. With the variety of fonts available, they can be used in design to create a wide range of impressions dependent on the particular goals that the design is aiming to achieve. A client should therefore not be guided by the aesthetics of the font, but rather, the impact it will create in the final design.

Legibility of the font

Since designs are aimed at passing on particular messages, the font used should be legible enough, so as to make it easy for the target audience to read and understand the message in the design. Again, the legibility of the font will be dictated by whether or not the design is for decorative purposes or it will be used for other reasons such as in the print media.

For instance, decorative fonts will always have low legibility since they are meant to attract attention while fonts meant for newspapers and novels will usually have high legibility. As a designer, you need to work together with the client and define an overall legibility that will cut across all the design. While considering legibility on how to choose a font, the following factors are worth considering-:

• Choose fonts with conventional letterforms
• Choose fonts with generous spacing
• Choose fonts with a tall x-height

Readability

Next to legibility is the readability of the font. It is possible to use a font that is easily legible but does poorly when it comes to readability. Such factors determine the readability of a font as the style, color, tracking, size and every other property useful for overall impression. For example, if your focus for the design is to have high readability, then the client should settle for a style that will not hinder the audience’s ability to get the full meaning of the message.

It is important for the client to remember when thinking on how to choose a font that the message of the design comes first before the style. This doesn’t imply that the style is not important, but there should be a balance between the style and the effectiveness of the message being passed across.

Aspects of appropriateness

It is true that there are other fonts more suitable for design tasks compared to others. While helping the client choose a font, aspects of appropriateness will be determined by the designer’s experience of working with different fonts. It will be upon the designer to advise the client on the best fonts to use to let him have a great design at the end of the project. Aspects of appropriateness are in most cases determined by the intent of the design, the mood of the design, and the aesthetics desired for the design.

Technical Consideration

When all is said and done, the client will leave the designer to embark on the project. As much as you may consider a plethora of fonts to use in any design, you also need to consider the technicalities of using the fonts for the projects. For instance, you have to weigh other specifics of the design and evaluate if the font chosen will not be problematic at all.
Suppose the design is going to feature a lot of numbers, your ideal font should have the kind of numbers you are likely to use. A client may not have such finer details of design but as the professional, you need to bring to their attention the technical considerations involving the use of various fonts. Never ignore technical details on how to choose a font when with the client.

Use these resources to access the best free fonts online!

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Using Royalty free fonts can help you turn around your designs from good to great. But it is important for every designer to realize that certain fonts usually come with usage restrictions, and you may be prohibited from using them for commercial purposes. It is very important to take note of such copyright issues as ignoring them may be a catalyst to a long drawn legal battle with the respective copyright owners.

As a designer, however, you should not restrict your creativity prowess for the fear of running into legal problems when searching for fonts online. There are several places on the internet where you can find plenty of Royalty free fonts you can use for any commercial project. The only caveat to using these kinds of fonts is that they may not be of the very best quality, but if you do a little bit of digging and searching, you will find a good number of them that will fit your design purposes. Listed below are the various sources you can use to find several royalty free fonts for your projects-:

Urban Fonts

Urban Fonts is one of the few places where you will find fonts that are not just free, but also very cool for design. It presents you with a powerful search tool to let you search for the various fonts based on the names, as well as tags such like 3D, curly, comic, wave, college, cursive, etc. Urban Fonts has over 8,000 royalty free fonts as well as a few premiums ones available for purchase.

Font Squirrel

Font Squirrel is a powerful resource where you find an extensive range of fonts, ranging from calligraphic to Sans serif. It has awesome filtering capabilities to let you search for the fonts based on attributes such as those ideal for eBooks, print designs, desktop and mobile applications amongst others. The other beauty of Font Squirrel as a source of royalty free fonts is that it groups them according to various formats such as distressed, contemporary, retro, all caps and many others. The resource has more than 264 unique fonts

1001 Fonts

1001 fonts is one the oldest sources for royalty free fonts having been around since 1998. It has an extensive database of fonts, and it lets you search for the fonts based on any criteria you may have in mind. Though the name alludes to it having just only 1001 fonts, you will be surprised to learn that there are more than 6,000 royalty free fonts in this place.

Lost Type Fonts

Lost Type is not just a nice place to find lots of royalty free fonts, but also, it is a great resource for finding other fun graphic elements all presented in a nicely laid out interface. The site has over 50 fonts that you can download for free, and it also has a provision for you to set your pricing if you want anyof the premium fonts available. It simply implies that you can pay whatever price you feel appropriate for any font you would like to purchase.

Hype for Type

Hype for Type is a premium commercial font site, but it also has an enviable collection of royalty free fonts that are worth considering. With a collection of close to 100 choices, it has something for everyone irrespective of the types of design you have. It is also worth mentioning that Hype for Types has a fun feature that lets you play around with the various fonts you have selected so that you see the kind of flexibility they can offer you.

Google Fonts

It is surprising to note that the world’s biggest search engine is also a source for royalty free fonts. Google Fonts brings you more than 600 royalty free fonts that designers can download and implement o their designs. Though the site has a good number of free fonts, it is recommended that you double check to confirm the usage policy of the fonts, owing to a large number of creators submitting their fonts to this resource. The site also has filters to make it easy for you to search and locate the particular fonts you want.

DaFont

DaFont is another cool resource that every designer interested in getting royalty free fonts should know. It doesn’t just offer you with a huge collection featuring over 23,000 fonts, but also, it categorizes the fonts according to style thus making it easy for you to search for and download the various fonts you are interested in using. For instance, if you are searching for the right fonts for a logo project, you simply head over to the logo tab, and it will give you a wide range of fonts suitable for use in logo design.

These are only a few of some of the places where you can find royalty free fonts on the internet. Thoughthere are others, these will suffice for most of your design work. However, feel free to research further and discover others so that you increase your list of font resources.

Learn More about choosing the right typography here!

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For many people just starting out in design, the process of choosing the perfect typography is usually such a bewildering task. The choices seem to be endless with no straightforward way of knowing what to select and what to ignore. For someone to get it right in choosing the right type-setting, however, a combination of firm rules and lose set of intuition, as well as a few of years of experience, is necessary. But this is not to allude that you have to be an experienced designer to become a pro in using typography. It is only that you become perfect with consistent practice, but anyone, including the very new in designing, can still get it right with their typography the first time. Here are five important guidelines on how to choose the right typography-:

Understand the context of use

One secret to choosing the right typography is first to understand the context of use. This is of grave concern because, as designer, you are working on a design that will be used by other people and not for your personal use. Many beginning designers are fond of considering their individual preferences in the choice of type-setting, and they focus on what appeals to them. This is a destitute approach because you are egocentric on the design.

As a designer, you need to have a set of workhorse typography you can always turn to when the project demands. Of course, you will be comfortable with other typography more than others, and you will be naturally inclined to use them as opposed to trying new ones. It is imperative that you understand different typography and know exactly the particular contexts when they can be used without ruining the entire design.

Group Fonts in Families

Learning to group fonts into families will not just help you on how to choose the right type-setting for each design project that lands on your desk but also will save you a great deal of design time. The secret to grouping fonts into families is to have some structure that you can use to categorize mentally the various types of typography you encounter.

Typography can be divided into different categories, but for a good designer, you need not to keep track of all the types. Most of the expert designers only watch about five groups, and these are the ones they work hard to become proficient in using so that they can always adapt them and use them for different projects. There is already several classifications of fonts, but you are free to classify some as you dim right and in a manner that will enhance your skills as a designer.

Decisive use of contrast

Now that you understand the context under which you will use the typography, and you have also grouped them to suit your project and design habits, it is time to apply the principle of decisive contrast in the use of the typography. This is a paramount principle because many designers are misled into believing that every design must have a high contrast to be considered great. This is grossly wrong and as a designer, it pays to know when to mix and match and it pays even much better to know when you need not to mix and match in the first place. Whenever you are in the middle of a design and you are faced with a situation where you need to add additional typography, the rule of thumb is that even with the addition of the typography, the design should remain the same and if it has to change, then it has to change a lot. This is what is known as correspondence and contrast in design lingo. Avoid incremental variations or being wimpy with the contrast.

Whenever multiple typography is used in a single layout, the aim is to make them coexist peacefully without distracting the attention of the viewer into thinking that they are more than one design on the item.

Don’t be afraid to bend a few rules

Good designers are those who follow standard fonts and norms in design, but the great artists are those who are not afraid to intelligently break some of the rules and come up with unique designs. Occasionally, you can go a little bit overboard and try what your intuition is telling you as far as the current project is concerned. You will never understand how to choose the right typography if you are timid to explore on your own and do what the books are not telling you.

“There are no rules,” really!

When it comes to how to choose the right text, it boils down to one thing – there are conventions but never iron-clad rules on which is the best typography for each and every particular project. As a designer, you need to know about the basics then you will adapt yourself to the conventions and create your rules as you move along. With experience, you will no problem in deciding on the typography but it is always good to be flexible enough so that you have the competency to work with different typography on a countless number of projects.

Use this guide for helping you pick the best colors for your text as well!

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