Creative Use Of Typography In Graphic Design

In Creativity & Inspiration, Importance of Graphic Design, News, Tips and Tricks by JamieApril 5, 20130 Comments

When a designing and developing a flyer, brochure, logo, website etc, the choice of specific font or typeface used is of great importance — it either makes or breaks a design. This is where the technique and element of design, known as typography comes into action. However, typography is a great deal more than just stylish and colourful words. 

Typography in graphic design plays a crucial role. This design concept is both functional and aesthetic, in the sense that the choice of typeface used, aids in the readability of a design, as well as enhancing the overal look and feel. Thus, making the design visually appealing to the eye, impressive and attractive for the viewers. 

Creative Font Optimisation
Professional graphic designers may often adapt and stylise various typefaces over plain fonts with the accurate combination of dimensions, colors, spacial arrangement (also known as leading and kerning) along with the creation of  innovative ideas. This technique takes time and creates a unique, one-of-a-kind design, which is most often the case for a logo design. The font of a logo, should reflect the brand’s image, voice, values and create an identity that will stand out from the crowd. It is what adds character and flavour to the essence of the brand.

On a website for example, when adding relevant content, a designer must consider that the font used must be easily readable, legible and visible at initial glance. Thus a clean and crisp fonts would be an added benefit to increase the traffic and potential loyal customers of the website.

Systematic Hierarchy
The structure and layout of designed materials or a web page should follow a systematic hierarchy of elements. A befitted and well organised page should be user-friendly, functional to serve it’s purpose of addressing the message as well as visually appealing. Similarly for typography in design — a designer may choose to use one or two font families (such as Helvetica Neue) and utilise various styles within the family — for example, light, medium and heavy weights of the font. It is important that the design is not crowded with many different styles of typeface, as this will create a mess which will confuse the reader, not knowing where to look first, potentially deterring them from the design all together. 

Along with the choice of fonts, the placement and positioning of various typefaces used together in one space add to the notion of visual hierarchy and typography in design. For instance, the headline font in editorial or an article should be reflective of the story, perhaps a large, bold, strong and powerful font — choosing a heavy weight san-serif style. Whereas the body copy should be easy to read a smaller sizes, lighter in weigh, clean and not as stylised. 

 The above information on typography in design, are some of the many aspects to consider when designing for print and web purposes. So the next time you intend to mock-up a design or present a design concept to your graphic designer, consider using or discussing typography techniques to aid in producing an effective, readable and creative piece of visual communication.

Share the love