Whether you are drafting a website, flier, annual report, brochure, billboard, post card, or email and social media campaigns, the way it’d styled influences readability.

Think of it this way, when we style fonts, we give our reader a roadmap via a visual hierarchy. It shows the reader where to start on the page or website, where to go, and what to do next. We talk more about readability in our blog, 3 Fonts We Love in 2023.

Styling Fonts

The first step is in using a font is selecting a readable font or two and using it consistently, ideally across all platforms. You can officially call these, your brand fonts! If you find your brand font isn’t available on a particular platform, like Mailchimp, or your CRM, go with the fonts that are most similar to your brand fonts. For a wide range of free fonts, visit the Google Fonts webpage.

At Radar Designs, we have one primary font in our brand. It’s the font on this website. We have a few other fonts we use in fun and abstract ways but we don’t use these as our everyday fonts. It’s one of our rules. In fact, we have several rules around how we utilize and style our fonts.

You should too!

So let’s make some rules! It’ll help us in creating a visual roadmap.

Font Sizing

If we don’t provide the reader contextual clues, they’ll feel lost in a sea of text. Font sizing does this. It gives the reader cues on the most important place to start and where to go next.

For starters, font sizing should be done in a hierarchy and consistently. By hierarchy, we mean selecting font sizes for headers 1 – 5 and paragraph text. This blog post itself is a good example of font sizing hierarchy. The large header at the top of the page says, ‘READ ME’ while the sub headers tell our eyes to “READ US NEXT.” The sizes of the headers on this page and on this entire webite have been predetermined by our rules which we then apply to scale as needed for print materials, etc.

Wondering what actual point size your text should be? That’s up to you but scroll below to see a sample style guide that you can use as a template for your business!