Typography Tips (Fonts!)

Churches tend to put out a lot of printed material.  Odds are you don’t have a professional graphic designer around to handle these things.  Good typography is a great way to spruce up a design. For us novices all a big fancy word like typography means is fonts!

Basic Tips

 

• Don’t use more than three fonts.
• Use sans-serif for headers, serif for body text (serifs are the little feet on fonts like Cambria or Times New Roman, so sans-serif means without serifs on fonts like Helvetica or Arial).
• Don’t go smaller than 12pt, 11pt in an emergency.
• Leave some white space for heaven’s sake!  Space between paragraphs, wide margins… wherever you can give the eye a little breathing room.

 

My favorite quickie guide is Seth Godin’s Seven Tips for Amateur Type Designers.  Very short and very excellent.

Advanced Tricks, or “It Doesn’t Fit!”

There are three places where I’ve learned to adjust text to make it fit, either to squeeze in or spread out.  None of them are font size!

 

• Paragraph Spacing: Odds are you have a menu to change paragraph settings (in Word it’s under Format > Paragraph).  You can add spacing before and after.  Adding space before headings or after paragraphs usually looks real nice.  Work in 6pt increments and see what looks nice.
• Kerning: Kerning is an old typography term for reducing the space between letters in a word, usually by fitting them together using each letter’s natural space (like tucking an ‘r’ into the space around an ‘o’).  Kerning is usually found in the character spacing menu (in Word that’s Format > Character Spacing).  Don’t condense kerning more than 1/20th the font’s normal size (so no more than .6pt kerning for a 12pt font).
• Line Spacing: In that paragraph menu from before you’ll probably see line spacing near paragraph spacing.  It’s usually either set in terms of ’sp’ or just says ‘Single.’  You can reduce line spacing by as much as 10% for squeezing.  Expanding to 1.15sp looks fantastic when you’re not crunched.

Finding New Fonts

Your one-stop-shop should be dafont.com – it’s free, it’s got lots of useful categories, and you can type in the word(s) for a preview of them in each font.  Don’t use more than one crazy font in a project, and only use it for big title words.  Your main text should always be a familiar, simple font like Cambria or Helvetica.

Wrapping Up

That’s it for now.  You should have a lot of helpful tips and tools for your creative ideas.  Look around and see what other people are doing, too.  You can take lots of inspiration from other churches or websites like Church Marketing Sucks or Church Relevance.  Good luck, and let me know how your designs go!