What’s the difference between font and typeface? Between serif and sans-serif? How do you choose what font pairings are best together to ensure you’re coming across professionally within your brand and website?

In today’s post, I’m going over a quick breakdown of the basics of typography, as well as providing some great, professional, and free font pairings you can use for your own brand, making sure you’re putting your best (font) foot forward.

Let’s begin!

TYPEFACE: A typeface is the actual design of type. It’s the overall look of the entire set of characters that make up the typeface family. For example, Helvetica is a typeface and is made up of a whole collection of fonts that include specific weights, styles, and sizes, as well as italic versions.

FONT: A font is a typeface set in a specific style, size, spacing, weight, etc. For example, Helvetica bold 12pt is a font.

LEADING: Leading is the vertical spacing between lines of type. Leading becomes especially important when dealing with ascenders and descenders. (The parts of a letterform that extend above or below the x-height. The tops of d, t, and I are ascenders and the bottoms of g, y, q are descenders. You want to have enough space between lines of text so they don’t touch.)

KERNING: Kerning is adjusting the space between two individual letters or characters. Sometimes when certain letters are typed next to each other, they will either have too much or too little whitespace between them and need to be manually adjusted.

TRACKING: Tracking is adjusting the spacing between characters over an entire word or selection of text. Similarly to kerning, sometimes the spacing between letters needs to be adjusted manually to achieve a uniform and equal appearance of whitespace throughout the word.

Font Pairings

And as for font pairings, having a set of go-to font’s you consistently pair together throughout your brand and website is super important for establishing your brand’s personality and tone. Each and every font has a particular set of feelings and personality traits associated with it. When choosing your fonts, make sure they align well with your brand’s persona and give off the vibe you’re aiming for.

Here’s a set of 10 free font pairings you can download for free via Google Fonts.

If you’re thinking you’d rather hand off choosing the perfect fonts to a trained pro, then I’d love to start this conversation and chat with you about ways we can elevate your brand through intentionally chosen fonts (and so much more)!

I’m now booking for April/May 2020 with just a few spots remaining! Get in touch via my contact form on my website or reach out at hello@ashleyferreiradesign.com.