Now, I don’t mean how many fonts you have available in your Photoshop font list, I’m talking about using 5-6 different font styles crammed in a single layout. It’s like plucking beautiful doves from the sky and messing up their feathers on purpose.
Before anyone jumps the gun and tell me about all the super designy stuff that uses a large number of fonts, those are merely the exception and not commonplace. To use a great number of fonts effectively, there must first be a great understanding of typography and how each font can affect one another. Every font that you add to the mix will increase the complexity and difficulty of the design. So use more fonts at your own risk, you’ve been warned!
While the design may have started out innocently enough with the attempt to separate elements in the design, an overuse of fonts usually make it look more like a flea market flyer more than anything else.
If you must use typography to separate areas in your design, try using fonts in the same font family at least. Fonts such as Helvetica or Utopia have a very large breadth of styles, enabling you to use different weights in your design to separate the elements. Such as using “Medium” for body copy and “Bold” for headlines. But even then, still try to keep the different font style usage to a minimum.
After you have mastered using different font weights within one family for your designs, try adding a font from a vastly different font family to create a distinctive difference through the typography. Why use a vastly different font family rather than something more similar, such as Utopia and Garamond? The reason is because the resulting difference might be mistaken for a poorly designed variation of the same font family, rather than a purposely chosen 2nd font family.
The same applies to font sizes that are really close to one another, but not exactly the same. The viewer’s eyes will wonder whether the font size is the same, not quite sure, and it’ll just end up looking sloppy and unprofessional.
Play with your fonts, learn about them, have fun with them, but please do not abuse them. Got any examples of typography that you hate or love? Share them here!
Oooo, I like the blue in the last pic though. I’ll see if I can find some examples while doing my morning rounds.