There is a lot that needs to be considered when selecting the right fonts for your marketing material. Not only do you need to make sure that the font you choose is a great reputation for your school’s brand, but it also needs to be easy to read and appropriate for the marketing material in question. Well-crafted typography has the power to reinforce your school’s message, instil emotion, and capture attention. With that being said, below, we are going to reveal some of the factors you need to consider when choosing a typeface for your school’s marketing campaign.
Design a visual hierarchy
The first step that you need to take is designing a visual hierarchy. For a lot of design scenarios, two fonts are going to be needed. One is for the body and the other is for the headline. This could be two font weights combined, variations of colour, or two font families that are different entirely. The aim here is to create a visual hierarchy that enables people to scan your marketing material quickly, so the most important elements can be identified, and the reader can understand how every element is linked to the other components on the page. After all, readers often have a habit of scanning the headline and then only focusing on what interests them. This is why you need to consider your visual hierarchy when you are selecting the correct typeface for your school’s marketing material.
Choose fonts that are comfortable to read
You also need to select fonts that are easy to read. There are a number of different factors that are going to determine how easy a font is to read. These two factors typically fall into two categories – legibility and readability. The former relates to how a typeface is designed and how effectively an individual character can be distinguished from another. It also refers to the word shapes and how well-defined they are. This is just as important for university signage as it is for brochure typography. Readability, on the other hand, relates to the way in which blocks of type and words are arranged on a page.
Legibility is something you need to pay a big amount of attention to. Fonts that look great in headlines do not often look as good when used for body copy. However, there are some exceptions to this rule. When you are looking for fonts to be used in the body copy or headlines, your selection can be narrowed down based on the kind of font face. For example, body or text faces are designed to be used in big areas of copy specifically and they are not supposed to be used for longer passages of reading. Display faces, on the other hand, have been designed to be used in headlines because they have a large format. They are also effective when it comes to creating short signs as well.
The shape of the characters is something else that is going to contribute to the legibility of the font. You have probably heard of serif and sans-serif before. The former has serifs, which are small ‘feet’, tailing from the edges of symbols and letters. A sans-serif font will not have this feature; there are no small lines projecting from the corners. This type of font tends to lend itself well to modern design trends, boasting more of a contemporary feel.
Convey your school’s brand message
Aside from the tips that have been discussed, it is also important to convey your brand’s message. Once you have a shortlist of different fonts to consider, you need to start thinking about your school and the sort of typeface that really falls in line with who you are as an educational institution. There needs to be consistency across all of your marketing materials as well, so make sure you choose something that you are going to be happy to stick with in the future. If you already have a bunch of marketing materials, you need to consider how your next campaign is going to fit into this.
Design for viewing on multiple devices
There are many different ways that your school’s marketing content is going to be viewed. If you create a printed brochure, for example, you are going to probably want to upload it online as well. It can then be viewed on everything from a smartphone to a large desktop computer. This is why you need to make sure that the typeface you select is right for viewing across numerous devices.
Choose the correct font size
Font size will largely depend on the surface or screen on which the message is going to be displayed. For paragraphs that have a number of lines, you want to keep the size of your body font limited to between 45 and 70 characters for each line. If you have more characters than this, it is going to be exhausting for the reader to try and scan back and forth, meaning they are going to be more likely to lose their place. If the lines are too short, it can result in heaps of whitespace running through paragraphs or awkward hyphenated breaks.
Use contrast to your advantage
Last but not least, it may sound obvious, but contrast is a critical component in terms of the readability of the font you use. Contrast is achieved by the use of colour and space. For books and blogs, dark text works well on a pale background. This is because the viewer has an improved reading experience for bigger blocks of text. The coloured type needs to be reserved for display text and headlines.
As you can see, there is a lot that needs to be considered when it comes to selecting the correct typeface for your school’s marketing. If you use the advice that has been discussed above, you will be able to put together a great approach for selecting the right typeface for your marketing material at your school.
