For a lot of beginners, the job of choosing fonts is a bit baffling. There are unlimited choices—from the typical ones to the elaborate styles—with no means of understanding the choices, only endless lists of recommendations. Choosing the right font is a combination of firm guidelines and loose intuition which is something that usually requires years of experience to have a feeling for. For advertising companies that are still having problems with what typeface to choose, here’s a quick selection guideline.
Forget individuality for a minute.
Although being unique is beneficial, especially in a cut-through industry, when it comes to typeface selection, it’s not as important. A lot of ad decision makers approach the selection of a professional font as though they are looking for new music to listen to. They evaluate the character of each typeface and hunt for something special or distinctive that conveys their specific visual taste and personal history. This strategy is a problem since it places far too much relevance on individuality. And advertising is bigger than just one person; it’s for a whole audience.
Choose what’s appropriate over style.
In most cases, picking a professional font in advertising is more like dressing up for work. Just like with clothes, there is a difference between fonts that are loud and stylish versus fonts that are practical and suitable for many situations. To make this tactic useable, find the right balance for the occasion, just like choosing a professional wardrobe with a hint of personality or sass. And while being appropriate is not usually a sexy approach, it is the firm guideline when choosing a font for advertising.
Learn the basics.
Typefaces can be divided into different categories. These divided categories can still be subdivided into smaller lists. Think about the Adobe, Lucinda, and Microsoft categories as examples. Each division has its own meaning and purpose. When is the right time to use the bold version of the font? Is it better to italicize the words? Learning the basics means understanding what works best for the brand.
Remember that too much is never good.
Sometimes the image of a brand is loud, bright, and happy. It goes without saying that the font should also mirror these characteristics. While this is okay in general, it’s important to create a balance and not overused these features.
Professional typefaces don’t have to be boring, but they should always stand for a solid brand image. To make your decision easier, here are 30 impressive typefaces you should consider for your next advertising campaign.
Mute by Indian Type Foundry
Mute is a humanist sans typeface family developed for User interface (UI) designs. Its letters have low stroke-contrast and terminals that end on the horizontal or the vertical, making its apertures open and the counter forms between its characters clear and compact.
Triump by Latinotype
The typeface family Triump is a simple sans serif with 6 weights from Thin, ideal for use as an epigraph, to Black for head titles of special impact. Excellent for applying in graphic design as logos, trademarks, posters, editorial and web design. Inspired by the classic types of the late twentieth century with rounded corners that give the typography a smooth appearance with rounded ends.
The Carpenter by Fenotype
The Carpenter is an elegant and versatile connected script family of three weights. The Carpenter also has a set of ornaments, patterns and pictograms designed to support the script font. This font is effective and easy to use for creating ambitious headlines, logos & posters with a custom-made feeling.
Carnas by Hoftype
Carnas is forceful and strong enough for headlines and signage. Despite the reduction in its shapes, it is pleasantly readable for both shorter and longer text applications. The family consists of 16 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography.
Amsi Pro by Stawix
Amsi is a modern typeface equipped with three different widths; Normal, Narrow and Condensed.
Sofia Pro by Mostardesign
With its 16 fonts, Sofia is an ideal font family for text, branding, signage, print and web design creation.
Aphrodite Slim by Typesenses
Aphrodite Slim Pro was constructed with deep calligraphic ideals. The typeface was mainly inspired by lettering books and calligraphy masters.
Santis by Latinotype
Santis is a multiface type, special for logos, brands, magazines and editorial world. Especially for setting trends in fashion and design. The particularity of this font is that you can easily read it, even when applying swash type letters. It is a Didot based font. Santis versatility can harmoniously display a word or phrase.
Lulo Clean by Yellow Design Studio
Lulo Clean is friendly, retro, and amazingly 3-dimensional. Endless effects can be created by adding different colors to each of the 5 stackable layers. Lulo Clean is all-caps and includes regular and bold weights and extensive language support.
TT Supermolot by TypeType
TT Supermolot is a modern interpretation of an old font. This typeface works great for infographics and any structured information. You can use these fonts almost everywhere. The modern open grotesque forms and classic fontfamily formula: Thin, Light, Regular, Bold, Black and Italics.
PF Bague Sans Pro by Parachute
PF Bague Sans Pro is a versatile monoline typeface with a distinct and eye-catching personality. Despite its inspiration from early 20th century geometrics, it diverts from the mechanical rigidity of those typefaces by incorporating humanist characteristics, such as subtle variations in stroke width and open counter shapes with vertical endings. This is a very clean and legible typeface with a warm and well-balanced texture which is ideal for intense editorial use in magazines and newspapers.
Bambino by Mindburger Studio
Bambino Font Family is a typography project by Milos Mitrovic. Bambino has an influence of 1920’s Futura like fonts and art deco look and feel. Combining it’s vintage character with clean geometric form and organic flow, Bambino is shaped to fit modern aesthetics. There are 12 fonts (six weights with italics) included in the family.
Weitalic by Wilhelm Eckert
Weitalic has strict and angular strokes, but at the same time possesses a calligraphic look – an interplay of contrasts. Thanks to the very eye-catching features the result is a distinctive typeface that looks good in both the headline and the area of body text.
Metronic Slab Pro by Mostardesign
Metronic Slab Pro is a slab serif typeface with a technological and minimalist look for text and headlines. It has six versatile weights from Air to Black with an alternative glyph set to improve its use in different graphic contexts. Metronic Pro has a wide range of OpenType features such as: old style and proportional figures, ligatures, case sensitive forms, fractions, stylistic alternates, arrows and an icons/ornaments set. This set of 60 icons, directly inspired from the typeface improves the OpenType features and can be quickly and easily use in your web design, GUI design, graphic design or any other graphic work.
Exo Slab Pro by Ndiscovered
Exo Slab Pro is a slab serif with a technological and futuristic tone. Even though it has a very peculiar look and many distinct shapes that pop out in an headline, it also works well as whole creating a nice shade of text.
Desire by Borges Lettering
With over five years of design and development, Desire is a pursuit of epic proportions and ready to make a statement by adding elegance and unique flair to your next design project. The typeface offers an expansive set of options to create logos, headlines and titling. It is well suited for book covers, editorial, packaging, advertising, branding and more.
FF Meta Serif by FontFont
FF Meta Serif has 12 weights, ranging from Light to Black (including italics) and is ideally suited for advertising and packaging, book text, editorial and publishing, logo, branding and creative industries, small text as well as web and screen design.
Genius by Artegra
Genius is a clean, geometric typeface with great legibility and modern look, which makes it a perfect typeface for any kind of use. It’s especially suitable for branding, advertising, magazines, web design and so on.
Alumni by TypeSETit
Alumni is a true departure from present trends, this font resurrects the clean and simple forms made popular in the 1950s.
AmpleSoft by Soneri Type
AmpleSoft is a display type family, optical mono linear and a bit squarish in nature. It has smooth curve instead of sharp angle formed by the junction of two strokes, which is a prominent feature of its design. It is designed to be a little eye-catching yet legible. It is graphically strong and command viewerís attention. The overall appearance of type is suitable in setting it as heading, title, headline, etc.
Snackbar by Sideshow
Snackbar is a classic hand-lettered script that is sure to light up any layout. It’s perfect for when your designs call for a wider and more sophisticated look and it’s dished out with Italic, Light, Light Italic, Bold, and Bold Italic.
Hurme Geometric Sans by Hurme Design
Hurme Geometric Sans is a series of font families all with distinctive qualities and features but share the same basic construction and proportions.
Core Rhino by S-Core
Core Rhino is a contemporary typefamily that comes across as soft and gentle. Core Rhino displays warmth through its roundness and curved letterforms. Also it is legible in prints and on screens.
Trim by Letters from Sweden
Fighting against the desire to make something similar, this new typeface instead takes the concept to a whole new level by trimming not only diagonals, but all possible letters! The result is something – different. Trim comes in a large family including manually hinted webfonts and high quality desktop fonts. Some are fat, some are skinny and some are just lagom.
Futura by Bitstream
Futura is the fully developed prototype of the twentieth century Geometric Sanserif. The typeface is functional yet friendly, logical yet not over intellectual.
