So in the last post, I told you not to use more than 3 different fonts in your piece.  Today the focus is on what to do when choosing those fonts.  When you are choosing these 2-3 fonts, make sure the fonts are indeed different enough that you can tell they were picked on purpose.  For example, don’t pick two fonts like Times New Roman and Book Antigua, that are different fonts, but really not that different.  Or Arial and Verdana.  It creates the effect of something just being “off” because it’s not entirely clear they’re different fonts, and it looks like it might be a mistake.  Pick two fonts that are obviously different.  The easy way for a beginner to do this is to use a serif (font with the little curls at the bottom of the letters – Times New Roman is the one most people are most familiar with) with a non serif (Arial is the familiar example) font.  Once you get into really working with your typography there is a lot more to the nuances of different fonts (maybe for future posts) but when starting out, go for basics.

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