- Law 31, limit typefaces to two per document.
You may have hundreds of typefaces on your computer
and there are hundreds of thousands more
typefaces out in the world that are available
for purchase and some of them are even free to download.
With all of these typefaces at your fingertips,
it's really easy to over do it
and junk up your documents with too
many typefaces in one document.
Using too many typefaces results in
a document that's unprofessional and messy.
Unless you're a trained, experienced graphic designer,
it's best to stick with two typefaces as a maximum
in any document that you create.
Here's an example of a flyer
that uses 10 different typefaces.
All of the text looks so different
from all of the other text,
that this doesn't even look like a cohesive document.
Instead, it looks like a bunch of unrelated
text blocks that are all screaming for our attention.
And the result is a noisy,
unorganized, and unprofessional mess.
Now here's the same basic flyer with
the same information, same layout,
but here we've chosen two typefaces
and this document only uses those two typefaces.
In the second example, we chose the two typefaces
but note that we still used bold,
we used different type sizes within
each typeface that we chose.
Those are still excellent ways to chunk information.
And also, to be able to call attention
to certain parts of a document.
But we can do those things without
necessarily changing the typeface.
Overall, this second flyer is calmer,
it's better organized, and it's definitely easier to read.
It looks like a professionally produced document.
In this example here, we chose to use one Serif typeface
and one Sans Serif typeface.
And this is a great place to start.
Serif typefaces have little feet
that appear at the end of each stroke.
And these little feet are called serifs.
In French, the word "sans" means without.
And so Sans Serif means without serifs.
And therefore a Sans Serif typeface
does not have the little serifs at the end of each stroke.
You can see when you're looking at this
document that we've created, that the Serif and the
Sans Serif typeface are visually pretty
different from each other.
And when you're choosing typefaces
to use in your documents, you want to chose
typefaces that are noticeably different from each other.
Why is that?
Sameness competes but differences contrast and highlight.
And those are our goals when you're
choosing different typefaces for a document.
Here's that same flyer again.
But this time, we've redesigned it
and we're using two Sans Serif typefaces.
These are two different typefaces.
They're different, but they're not different enough.
And because they look so much alike,
it's hard to tell if this was a mistake.
The sameness of these typefaces
actually makes them compete with each other.
And it makes people focus on the typefaces
themselves rather than the content.
We'd be better off, if we had chosen just
a single Sans Serif typeface for the entire document.
It's much cleaner.
That's a less visually distracting solution.
And it's also a perfectly legitimate solution.
You don't have to use two typefaces in your documents.
But you don't want to use more than two
unless you have some good design education
or some good experience.
Let's go back to our example where
we used two Sans Serif typefaces.
And we're going to compare this
with our flyer that we looked at before
where we chose one Serif and one Sans Serif typeface.
The contrast between these two typefaces
is very clear, very obvious.
The typefaces are different,
in fact they're very different from each other.
This creates a very nice amount of contrast.
The typefaces are different enough,
that they aren't competing with each other.
Instead they're actually complimenting each other
and highlighting the differences between the
different types of text in our flyer.
Let's summarize.
Limiting yourself to two typefaces per document
is an easy, instant way to make
your documents look more professional.
You want to chose your two typefaces wisely though.
And make sure that there's enough difference
or contrast between the typefaces in
order to add visual interest and help with organization.
That's law 31.
Limit typefaces to two per document.