Design is an interesting thing. On the surface, it seems like it’s all art and that it takes an artistic eye to create a great logo or design a perfectly balanced pamphlet. Dig a little deeper, though, and you discover that great designs often work because they deploy the right fonts for the text. Sometimes we have a gut reaction to a certain font — Comic Sans-induced eye rolls, anyone? — but there’s also some science behind picking a font for readability, brand loyalty and other considerations. Here’s what science has to say about making your font work for you.
For Readability, Choose Sans-Serif Fonts
Literacy teachers have long been interested in how children turn scratch marks on a page — or computer screen — into something meaningful, and their studies about font choice have proven that the plainer a font is, the easier it is to read. Serifs are the little extra lines added to the ends of letters to make a font more interesting: Times New Roman and Baskerville are classic examples or serif fonts. They may be pretty, but each of those little extras adds a nanosecond to the brain’s processing speed, so if you want your audience to be able to take in a lot of information quickly, stick to sans-serif fonts like Helvetica, Chivo or Josephine Sans.
Build Trust With Familiar Fonts
In a Yale study, marketing researchers found that subjects who read two different pamphlets — one in a familiar font, the other in a wacky one — were much more likely to purchase the item from the “company” with the familiar font. Familiarity breeds trust, which is why so many big companies with successful logos stick with their font for decades — people know and love it. Some of the most popular — and therefore, most familiar — fonts today include Bodoni, Franklin Gothic, Lucida Sans and Rockwell.
Capture Attention With Something Different
All that trust-building is fine, but if your product or service is new on the scene, you may need a different tactic to get people to notice you. This is where a totally unique font can help forge brand identity and get people to take notice. Because an unfamiliar font takes readers longer to process, it forces them to slow down and really concentrate on your message — and they’re likely to remember it for longer. Handwriting-style fonts like Noble Notes or Home Made Apple look great and take a little longer to read, as do script-style fonts like Parisienne and Yellowtail.
Get Elegant to Increase Satisfaction
David Lewis performed a simple font study that provided diners with two menus: one in a plain font and one in a fancy script. Everyone was served the same soup in the same dish, but the ones who ordered it from the menu with the calligraphy font thought theirs tasted better. If you want to impress your customers, Benson Script or a Gothic typeset like Unifraktur Maguntia could be just the thing you need.
Knowing your goals for your design is the first step in figuring out what font — or combination of fonts — to use in your work. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the unexpected until you settle on what really looks right. When you do, there’s a good chance that you’ve tapped into the hidden science of font preferences in your work.
Ready to experiment with how the looks of different font can totally change your branded materials? Check out Easil to see how easy it is to create gorgeous marketing campaigns in no time.