The Art of Font Selection Part 1

     Mastering the art of font selection is something that takes year of practice. Having been in the Graphic Art industry for the past seven years this is one of the areas that I still work on every project I get. There are certain fonts that I have come to favor as an artist and at times it is hard to pull myself away from using the same fonts on all my art. However, in order to make things stand out and make a customer’s product uniquely theirs it is imperative to not only produce a stunning layout but to mix up the fonts you use. There are probably a hundred ways to figure out the font that you want to use but I will begin sharing with you how I work with choosing the right font for my artwork. First I will show you how I begin the process of chose the font types. In the coming days we will build on this until you have a complete picture of my process.

Here you see a picture of a 4x6 post card being used as a prayer card. Before I ever choose a font for this work I had put the entire arangment of pictures together. Once everything came together it was time to begin working with font. Two questions I asked myself before beginning the font picking process were the following: “Who are they” and “Where are they going?”

     Obviously I knew the answers to those questions since I was the designer, but these would be the questions that people would have in their minds when they met this family and it was important that these questions be answered as soon as they see the card. One of the ways to make the distinction of who and where was by selecting two font types. We first answer the question of who by using a strong serif font to give the family's name. If you aren’t familiar with the difference between serif and san serif it can be explained this way. A serif font looks like this Here and a san serif font looks like this Here.
     The way we answered the second question of where they were going was by using a script font with a color overlay that coordinates with the German flag. What we have done is established a relationship with who and where in the minds of people simply by picking out fonts that correlated well with the project. This gives you an over all picture of how using different fonts for different purposes can accomplish the objective and distinguishing between two or more subjects. We will discuss more detail of font selection at another time, but in the mean time go create and image and play with your fonts some, practice makes perfect even in the design world.