To Help Your Designs Look Better 10 Type Rules To Help Your Designs Look Better

1. Too many type faces One of the biggest mistakes that people make, is to use too many typefaces and styles. Try to limit any piece to 2 or 3 different type faces and styles.

2. Spacing Be careful not to crowd the typography. If you are having problems fitting something in, resist the urge to squish it together. Select a condensed font, or just shrink everything down and allow some breathing space. This applies to the edge of the page too, allow some white space around the text.

3. Alignment Please don’t just throw everything center aligned (unless that’s a deliberate design decision). Think about using a grid. Have everything on the page in relation to something else. Use guides and clean things up. Don’t throw things in the corners of a page either, that looks like you couldn’t decide where to put anything.

4. Decorative faces aren’t always beautiful You’ve found a nice decorative font, wonderful! Now, that doesn’t mean that it will reinforce your message, and at all costs, resist the urge to set paragraph text in that face. If it’s decorative, chances are, it has a history or a specific use, such as a headline or title. Often times, simple is better, that’s why fonts like Helvetica are so popular.

5. Size matters but if you set your paragraph too large, it tends to feel cheap. Really think about the size of the text. Titles are nice bold and large, Think about it. You go to a nice restaurant and the menus are often written in smaller print, it makes it feel classy. ( Make sure it’s not so small it’s hard to read). If you are using heading and paragraph text, don’t be afraid to make the headings much larger than the body.

6. Readability Whatever you do, make sure that people can read your message. Dark text on a dark color, not a good idea. Even worse, tying to apply small type over a high contrast photo. Remember less is more, this has never been truer than behind text that is supposed to communicate a message.

7. Color What color is best for type? Generally, believe it or not, black or white is often best. Why would I say that? Because the grayscale tones are pushed to very strong values. If you use color, consider muting the saturation a bit. Brightly colored type can be difficult to read. Beware of vibrating colors such as a red directly on a green. Rainbow colored gradients are probably not your best choice.

8. Grouping Group related pieces of information together. This will clean things up a lot. Examples: Look at a movie poster, all the credits are grouped into an attractive block. This block can now be treated as a single design element. For examples of bad grouping, open the yellow pages.

9. Leading This is the spacing between lines of text. It’s much classier to open up the spacing. It’s more inviting to read when there is resting space for the eyes in between lines. As a rule of thumb, try to use at least 2 points higher than the type size. For example: 10pt type should have a 12pt leading for maximum readability.