Typography for designers
Get typography right for designers
Designing your product or your application can be a wonderful experience. You may have thought of a business strategy, what to put, how the processes are going to be and what type of an audience you are trying to pitch the product to.
In order to get your idea through to your potential customers, investors and users the communication play a key role in it. The communication between the user and the application, the designer can give a clear idea about the purpose and the intention of the application to the user. The use of text in the application creates a better and clear communication towards the user.
In design, the use of typography plays a significant role. Good typography always makes good reading pleasure, making reading almost effortless. The readers will feel comfortable with what they are reading and wish to continue. Bad use of typography may give the feeling of frustration to the user making them discontinue from what they are reading from.
So what should we do?
In the design world, there are many theories and do and do not’s when come to use of typography. I have gone through several articles that I felt interesting and found out few details that I would love to share with you. The point is there are no hard and fast rules when come to use typography. There are some rules and tips that could help designers to do better designs with better communication.
The typography comes in two main ways.
- Expressive typography
- Functional typography
We will mostly focus on functional typography which is meant to read.
Typography rules and tips you should look in to
1. When in doubt, always align the text to left
Have you ever consider why this is important? In western culture, people read from left to right and top to bottom. In some Asian countries, the people have the same pattern of reading. Since the pattern of reading is being practiced for centuries, the human eye can understand the edge and make the readability easy. The only reason why you should make your text-align to the left because it’s straightforward to read.
2. Keep the number of fonts to minimum
Using more than one font, the designer has to be a master of using typography in an application. Until you master typography, I recommend designers to stick to one font. If you use more than one font, the chances of the application context to become un-construct and confusing is at a high rate. So to avoid those type of issues always one font type will be useful.
When coming to the decision making of which typeface to be used in the application you have to be careful. For example, we can start by selecting the typeface to the body of the application. It is the main typeface that is going to be used in most of the application and have a big impact in your design.
It is always better to avoid using multiple fonts in the same classification. Less the numbers are, more focus on creating a wonderful layout for the application.
3. Skip a font weight when using fonts
To create a better contrast between the text you can regularly use to bold font weight change or medium to extra bold font weight change. This will allow the users to identify key points in the application as well as focus on important parts of the conversation of the application. For example, you can use bold for the text headers and light font for the body will create a better contrast between the texts that have been used.
4. Use proper font size
The font size is one of the biggest impacts when come to using the product. If the product contains small letters, most of the readers or application users may find it frustrating and start going over the text without reading the information provided to complete a task or achieving the end goals.
Bigger text can be a bigger distraction to the user. The attention towards the bigger text can divert the users from their actual needs in the application.
To avoid these types of situations we can easily use gridlover online tool and get the fonts in your applications fixed for a better and clear experience.
5. Avoid CAPS for every word
In an application, you are always trying to convey a message towards the users. When the words are typed all in CAPS, it is quite difficult for a user to read the words in a small space of time. If you are creating logs and other graphics that involve CAPS text will be totally fine. The texts that involve more than one line I will always recommend non-CAPS words, so it has better readability when coming to normal text.
6. Keep a proper gap between words
In reading the gaps in between the paragraphs and between the lines helps the reader to get a clear understanding on which are the endpoints and can read the lines without overlapping and give frustration.
When there is less gap between the text and line spacing, the paragraphs feel crowded. We can improve the line spacing and the gap between the text allowing a better reading pleasure to the user who is going to read the content.
Conclusion
We sometimes avoid the topic of text thinking that it has no part to do with product design or user experience. Good use of typography makes us read and makes us feel well too. It is really important to focus on typography in this digital era where everything we read is on the internet. Good use of guidelines and principles will make a good product that users would love to use with all other principles and techniques in user experience design.
