Typography at the Ohio State University is easy, with three (well, technically four) fonts to choose from:
- two official fonts, Proxima Nova and Capita
- another recommended font, Arial
- and one more, recommended by OSU Communications if you need a “handwritten” look, Snell Roundhand.
This short list makes choosing a font a snap – and it’s a lot more freeing than it sounds. Here’s a quick guide to choosing which one is right for your project.
You generally don’t notice the fonts around you, and that’s for the best. If you read an article about birds or the latest sports game, you should be taking in migratory habits and the score, not the way the letters are written on the page. When you do notice fonts and the way the words are written, it’s usually because the wrong font was chosen. This can be for a couple of reasons – either the font is difficult to read, or it’s inappropriate for the subject matter.
It’s pretty easy to tell when something is difficult to read, but harder to tell when it’s simply a bad fit. Why do the way letters are shaped have an impact on how we interpret them?
Good typography is invisible, and in many ways, subconscious. The majority of people on the planet are inundated with written text everywhere we go, whether or not we stop to read it. Text is on billboards, websites, wrappers, clothing, books. Whether we realize it or not, this text influences us to associate certain letter shapes, colors, and weights with very specific attributes: types of products, level of quality, target audience, and more.
Millions of people can recognize the “Coca-Cola” font, but we’d be very surprised to read an article about cats in written in it. After years of conditioning, seeing the Coke font on anything but a Coke just feels wrong. Likewise, the famous font Comic Sans isn’t for business stationery. Why? Its rounded letters and uneven, handwritten spacing mimic the rounded, handwritten letters found in comic word bubbles. You don’t want your serious company represented by a comic book font, or like something an intern hand-wrote over lunch break.
What does this mean for your brochure and class PowerPoint? Two things – if you use the wrong font, your students are going to spend more time wincing at the text than learning the material. But if you use the right font, you’re at an advantage, because you’ve already created the right feeling. Are you advertising a fun event? Use a font that implies fun, and half your poster is written already. Is your paper on a serious topic? Use a serious font that reflects the respectability you deserve.
What is a serious font? A fun font? Which letter shapes are compassionate or festive or fancy? The University’s fonts gives you more options than you might realize:
The above are only a few of the many font weights and styles that can be expressed with just the two official fonts. Changing the weight and style of a font can give it a completely different feeling. I consider Capita to be the more casual of the two fonts, but Capita in ALL CAPS can give the opposite impression, one of prestige and seriousness. Take Proxima Nova, bold it, and you have a font for tailgates and student organizations, but use the thinnest option, and you have a font for art galleries and conferences.
There’s no hard and fast rule on this – for example, 30 years ago, serif fonts like Capita and Times New Roman were considered more prestigious than plainer fonts like Arial. But in the last decade or so sans-serif has become so ubiquitous that serif fonts are often restricted to headlines or the body text of journal-style and editorial pieces.
So how do you know which font to use? Write out a title in one of those two fonts (plus Arial and Snell Roundhand), and look at it. Print it out. Show it to a friend or passing stranger. Ask yourself if you would go to your event or listen to your lecture, given no other information than that title and that font. You’ll be surprised what you can find out just from doing that. And when in doubt, contact your graphic designer.
Chelsea is the graphic designer for Web Communications in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. EHE faculty and staff can contact her with any design questions or resource requests.