Typography Tips for Visual Designers
Today’s chosen theme: Typography Tips for Visual Designers. Step into a world where letterforms shape emotion, clarity, and trust. We’ll share practical strategies, real stories, and creative prompts—so you can craft typography that feels alive. Subscribe and join the conversation below.
Why Typography Is Your Quietest Power
Most screens are mostly type. Every button, label, and paragraph is part of your interface, whether you intend it or not. Treat typography like UI design, and ask readers to tell you where they pause, skim, and click.
Why Typography Is Your Quietest Power
I once designed a festival poster that felt inexplicably heavy. The fix wasn’t a new color or photo; it was tightening tracking and introducing a stronger typographic scale. Tell us about your biggest type rescue—someone will learn from it.
Define voice before you choose
Write three adjectives for your brand’s voice—confident, warm, inventive—and let them guide selections. A geometric sans feels different than a humanist serif. Share your adjectives in the comments and we’ll suggest starter families to explore.
A simple pairing framework
Choose one workhorse family for body text and one expressive family for headlines. Contrast category, not chaos: humanist sans with transitional serif, or slab serif with grotesque. Post your favorite pairing tests and why they work in context.
Licensing, performance, and fallback
Check licenses before publishing and load fonts efficiently to reduce layout shifts. Define thoughtful fallbacks by x-height and metrics, not just name. If your fallback looks ugly, your user sees ugly; test in throttled networks and share results.
Build a modular scale
Choose a ratio—like 1.25 or 1.333—and derive headline, subhead, body, and caption sizes from it. This creates rhythm you can feel. Share your chosen ratio and a screenshot; we’ll help refine your scale.
Contrast with clarity, not gimmicks
Make one thing the hero. Increase contrast using size, weight, or whitespace before color. If everything is bold, nothing is bold. Ask a friend to scan your page for five seconds and report the first three words they notice.
Spacing: Kerning, Tracking, and Leading That Feels Right
Display sizes often need slightly tighter tracking, especially in all-caps. But zoom out and squint; if counters close or letters blur, you went too far. Share your before-and-after screenshots and the values that finally sang.
Spacing: Kerning, Tracking, and Leading That Feels Right
Resist the urge to over-tighten paragraph text. Slightly looser tracking can improve legibility at smaller sizes. Test on low-resolution screens. Invite readers to try a paragraph on two devices and vote for the easier experience.
Design for real conditions
Check text in sunlight, grayscale, and night mode. If your headline loses contrast on a cheap screen, it fails. Post your contrast ratios and environments; help others understand how their audiences actually see content.
WCAG as a creative constraint
Aim for AA or AAA contrast without sacrificing personality. Adjust weight, background tone, or size to meet standards. Share your clever solutions where compliance improved aesthetics, and link to examples readers can test themselves.
Color psychology, tempered by clarity
Blue whispers trust, red shouts urgency, but legibility rules. Prefer hue shifts over tint reductions that kill contrast. Show your palette’s typographic samples and ask the community whether mood and readability align convincingly.
Microtypography: The Craft in the Details
Smart quotes, proper dashes, tidy ellipses
Use curly quotes, en dashes for ranges, em dashes for breaks, and true ellipses—not three periods. These cues improve rhythm and professionalism. Share your favorite keyboard shortcuts or plugins that make correctness effortless.
Ligatures and alternate glyphs
Turn on standard ligatures for smoother text and consider discretionary ones for headlines if they support the brand voice. Explore stylistic sets; sometimes one alternate g transforms personality. Post before–after images to spark discussion.
Rags, widows, and orphans
Clean rags by adjusting hyphenation and line breaks. Avoid widows and orphans with soft returns or minor copy edits. Try reading aloud to catch awkward breaks. Invite peers to critique your paragraph shapes and share their fixes.