Typography and Fonts (Fundamentals of Visual Storytelling by Piktochart)

➡️ Learn more about visual storytelling: https://piktochart.com/what-is-visual...

In this lesson, we’re going to learn about typefaces (also known as fonts), which give personality to your content. You will also find out how to choose the right font to amplify the meaning of your message and convey your feelings.

Depending on the choice of fonts, one message can be interpreted in two totally different directions. It is important to choose fonts that best represent your message and intention.

Fonts are categorized based on many types and classifications. To get started, we can look at the three main types: Serif, Sans Serif, and Fancy.
Serif fonts have a little pointy extension at the end of the strokes, as shown on the slide.
Sans-serif fonts. Sans means ‘without’ in French, so sans-serif fonts are those fonts without the pointy extension detail at the end of the strokes.
Fancy fonts include fonts that resemble handwriting, scripts, or decorative fonts.

Now knowing the different types of fonts, the question falls on choosing the right ones for your visuals. How to choose practical, high-legibility fonts that are easy to read without sacrificing your creativity?

Here are some tips on choosing fonts for your visuals:
1. Always go for your branding fonts. If you already have brand fonts, use them to create consistency among your collaterals, which is very important for your brand awareness.
2. If you can choose other fonts, you can go with fonts that best describe your brand personality. By brand personality, we refer to how you want to be portrayed as a brand to your audience, both internally and externally. Such as you want to be portrayed as an approachable brand to your customers, or you’re portraying yourself as a reliable brand that values tradition.
3. Another option is following the style your target audience prefers and the format used to approach your target audience. When you’re presenting your visual to important stakeholders, we recommend using high legibility fonts for a more formal visual. For less formal visuals like seasonal greetings, we can play with fun and fancy fonts.

We recommend pairing not more than two different fonts, ideally from different font types, to create a dynamic and contrast.
PRO Tips:
Play with the different sizes instead. We can keep a big font size for the Title. For subtitle and body copy, assign a smaller but readable size of 16-18pt.
Use bold or italic when you need to highlight important points or numbers; it helps your reader’s eyes to focus.

Just like that, you can have a great and balanced contrast without the need to use a lot of fonts.

Only by trying and exploring different fonts, you will find your best font pairing, but we agree that the process takes a lot of time. You can use a font generator like fontjoy.com to help you kickstart your font exploration. You can control the contrast level from high contrast to low contrast and simply click the Generate button to generate a combination of fonts and see the preview of how they look in different text sizes.

Which one is your most favorite combination? And which one you’re going to apply to your next visuals?