Typography Hacks: 5 Greatest Tips to Improve Your Design Immediately

Typography is one of the most important skills that every designer must master. From website design, graphics to brand identity, the most vital part always involves typo. With hundreds, if not thousands of choices, where do you begin to have a good typeface design? Looking for some effective tricks to boost your typography skill immediately? And we haven’t mentioned how to create a positive impact just with your design. Like most beginners, that’s what constantly on your mind these days, right?

Well, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s have a look at some of our greatest tips for typography that every designer can take advantage of. With the help of our guide, you can create some cool typeface for your next projects! Let’s get to work, shall we?

1. Choosing & pairing fonts

Just a couple of years ago, designers only had a few fonts material to work with. But now, we’re flooded with the amount of typeface that’s out there and waiting to be used. Due to that, you have to master your foundation first. 

The basics of typography are learning the font’s family, which only has 2 styles: serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts are all the typefaces that have “feet” or “tail”, which are the little things that go under the end of every stroke. Meanwhile, sans-serif fonts are just fonts that have no serif. 

After understanding this basic idea, next is learning to pair typeface.  Never use more than 3 fonts for 1 layout/ website. This is the most important rule that you must keep on your mind whenever working with typography. Nothing worse than getting messy with fonts. 

Thus, it’s crucial to maintain the font’s unity and variety. For instance, with every layout, you should decide the primary fonts for title and heading first. Next is choosing the body font and use it throughout your design. You can also spice up things a bit by adding 1 more font for quotes, special CTA,…. But it shall never have more than 3 fonts at a time.

2. Mix up your spacing 

When it comes to typography, most designers forget about the importance of spacing. In fact, appropriate space will make the reader/user feel much more comfortable reading and concentrating. This is one of the fundamentals of typography design that you must keep on your mind, no matter what projects you’re working on. With too much spacing, your copy would be lost in the whole design. Too little space, it’s too condensed. Try to mix up your spacing a little bit to create some interesting rest area, while connecting the entire paragraph together. 

With spacing, you should take your time to learn and experiment them out. Making the right decision will create an impressive positive result for your design.

3. Typography is all about contrast

The worst thing you would want is to end up with a color scheme that weakens all of your typography design. Monochrome might be the classic choice to show off your typeface. However, we’re sure you can do much better, just notice the contrast between your background color and your typo. Having fun with color contrast is one of the vital skills that keeps you creative with your design. Currently, we’re seeing an enormous trend of using pastel color backgrounds that match with a bolder, more vivid text color. Just ensure your copy is completely clear to read and you’ll be just fine with your typography.

Another great hack for designers is to always check your screen to make sure it shows true color. Thus never forget to require a test version from your printer to make sure the colors are not off before printing the full amount of work.

4. Structure list for legibility

Always prioritize reading ability when you’re working with typography. We highly recommend taking some time to structure the list for legibility and let’s not forget about considering the length and width of paragraphs. 

Structuring your copy will help users to consume the information much easier, reduce website bounce rate thus creating interest. We also feel the urge to mention that this trick will help you highlight important information about your copy as well. With most designs, we are more likely to break text and lists into chunks of 3-4 lines, and each line is no longer than half of your whole web page. Just don’t shove a wall of text into people’s faces, since they’re less likely to ready more than 10 words of that. Typography helps enhance users’ experience, so designers do your best with legibility.

5. Balance the rag text

This might not be one of the most exciting features of Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign, we know! However, you should never sleep on it. Balance Ragged Lines is an option that ensures your ragged text is balanced throughout the entire design. This is mostly used to achieve that neat, clean and appealing look for your copy. And we know there is nothing your users would love more than well-designed typography. With most website designs, we highly recommend using this option for headlines, body text and so much more. Of course, there are chances that you’ll need to manually do the job. But in general, these features work like a charm to us most of the time. 

That’s all the things you need to know to master your foundation of typography. However, don’t worry too much about making mistakes since we’re all growing from that. Keep going and being creative with your designs. We hope those tips will give you a great kick start with typography and can keep you going for the long run. If you want to learn more about website design and more fundamental information, follow us. We’ll have so many more blogs that you might find useful for your upcoming projects.