Fonts

Overview

Lesson

Fonts.

Typography is incremental in creating a great first impression and one of the first features that captivate a viewer’s eye. Typography is defined as the art of working with text, meaning how you would pair different types of fonts (ex. A title font and paragraph body font) and to achieve making it look aesthetically pleasing. ARC Profile offers a substantial amount of font options for one to choose. This lesson will cover how to choose an appropriate font that fits with your brand and profile.  

 

Common types of fonts.

Serif – Little strokes at the end of each letter, they give a traditional appearance and common in print. 

 

Sans-Serif – Have no strokes, they are cleaner and more modern, and easier to read on mobile/ desktop 

 

Display – Can refer to blackletter, all caps and fancy. They’re decorative and best for small amounts of text. 

 

Handwriting – Also referred to as script fonts but they are typically cursive fonts and all the letters will flow 

 

Monospace – A font style in which the space between each letter is exactly the same. Most monospace fonts have letter-spacing that is a bit greater than the average font.  

 

Fonts express your tone.

Fonts can come across casual, neutral, exotic in fancy script or graphic in bolded text. This is where you will need to think about your message and what you envision your brand to be. If you gravitate to simple and modern designs, you may prefer sans-serif styles. If your content is bold and graphic, display styles may suit your brand. A good trick is if you have a brand logo, use the same font styles to maintain brand consistency. 

 

How many fonts should be used?

The saying “less is more” can also apply to fonts, in which it’s best to stick to one to four fonts. Before going beyond four, try to make the current fonts you are using slightly different by bolding, italicizing, capitalizing, underlining and playing around with the font size. Be careful with font sizes as typically, larger font sizes are used for big titles with little text. The best way to pair fonts is to put yourself in the mindset that they should be complimenting one another. Two bolded display fonts will clash, as will two handwriting fonts. Classic complimentary styles are typically contrasting plain and bold, plain and italicized, a display font to a sans-serif font, a handwriting font to a serif font, or a bolded sans-serif font to a regular sans-serif font. The pairings are endless so we once again recommend you experiment with styles to obtain what best suits you!

 

ARC Profile – Brand Kit

When designing your brand kit, you are given the opportunity to select up to four fonts.  

 

  • Heading 1 – This is the font that will be used for your biggest titles. This could be the main title in your banner or information sections. An example is if your main title is “My Social Media Links”, this would be Heading 1 

  • Heading 2 – This is the font that will be used for titles below Heading 1 titles, or they can be called sub-titles. Following the prior example of “My Social Media Links”, if you have a sub-title below that says “Facebook”, this would be Heading 2. 

  • Heading 3 – This is the font that will be used for titles below Heading 2 titles and they are both below Heading 1 titles. They are essentially secondary sub-titles. Our recommendation is to use the same font for Heading 2 and Heading 3, to avoid overusing too many font styles. Following the prior example of “My Social Media Links”, if you have another sub-title below “Facebook” that says “Facebook Account #1”, this would be Heading 3. 

  • Paragraph – This is the font that will be used for your body text and will be your most important selection. You want to consider that the font is clean, legible, and compliments your heading font styles.  

 

ARC Profile – Font Selector

ARC Profile’s font picker is designed to make it simple for you to narrow down and easily experiment with the various font styles, to find the best ones to match your website! 

 

 

Additionally, ARC Profile’s font selector has a special language feature. For any international users whose first language is not English, you can select your familiar language and the fonts that support your language characters. To do this, simply click on “All languages” and a drop-down menu of different languages will display. In the below example, Bengali has been chosen and the fonts below will neatly print Bengali dialect.