Choosing & Using Fonts for your Business Card
Lesson 5 from: How to Design Business CardsLara McCormick
Choosing & Using Fonts for your Business Card
Lesson 5 from: How to Design Business CardsLara McCormick
Lesson Info
5. Choosing & Using Fonts for your Business Card
Lessons
Class Introduction
03:42 2What Information to Include on your Business Card
01:56 3Size & Orientation of a Business Card
03:31 4Choosing a Hierarchy & Layout for your Business Card
09:10 5Choosing & Using Fonts for your Business Card
09:36 6Color Combinations on a Business Card
06:47 7Logos & Images on a Business Card
06:53 8Printing & Paper Options for a Business Card
03:54Lesson Info
Choosing & Using Fonts for your Business Card
We were working with a typeface available in a variety of fonts and waits now I'm going to talk about other families and other styles and mixing two so not just sticking toe one sand sarah with multiple waits so when you're talking about typeface classifications there are four main ones sand saref ce which are helvetica avenir future aerial anything without a sarah if kazan's means without in latin sarah ifs are those little legs that you see those little moments on the typeface some examples of popular sarah's air casslyn garr amman, georgia times new roman and a lot of these should be on your computer or they're shipped with the adobe creative suite you can also purchase typefaces online the ones that I have here are all classics I'm not a big fan of ariel not a big fan of times new roman but if you want to use them you have them continuing on classifications slabs tariffs are gorgeous they're heavier than sarah ifs and the most common ones air clarendon and rockwell and then I recen...
tly stumbled upon clinics lab, which is a really well designed beautiful typeface from the foundry lost type and so everything that I talk about in this presentation you'll receive is a bonus material including a resource list but will also be made available and that has a list of fun foundries where you can buy typefaces and it includes other things that I talk about so I really like clinics lab right now, um looking over to script classifications snell round hand burgess script it's a really pretty one I'm not a script person, I don't use scripts all that often and when I do need that flavor of a script, what I'll do is I'll italicize of sarah so in the example that scaramanga italicize and it starts to feel a little bit script e but still elegant and again it depends on the content of your card, so if you're going to mix typefaces from two different families, you have to know what you're doing, so you want to have high contrast combinations so you want either a sand saref in a sarah if ah slab sarah if in a sand saref but not a sarah sarah of sand sands that's a no no so here helvetica and gary monde awesome you can't go wrong with that combination helvetica and avenir know the reason being is look how similar they look, so imagine if on a business card he said half of your information in helvetica havin avenir people would be like all of a sudden something's different but I'm not sure what it is so there's not enough contrast between those two typefaces so that's a thumbs down karen bond in georgia same thing they're both sarah ifs you can see that george is a little heavier but for the most part, if you use them together, it's not going to do anything it's just going to create confusion moving on to avenue in clarendon, those to work right? Because you have a sand saref and a slab. Sarah, if high contrast rockwell and clinics lab don't work, you can see how similar they are to each other. So you want to avoid that combination, but clinics lab and georgia, you would think that might work, but clinic slab is not a very heavy slab, sarah. So you have to be careful when mixing it with the sarah, if you can see again, there's not enough contrast. So let's, look at some examples of combining these typefaces. Here we have stacey cells who, by the way, it works in creative live and is amazing. And I just love her. And I think she has a fabulous name. So I've been using her in my presentation. Sort of is the the name? Um, on the left, you can see a combination of a sarah in a sand saref. And I used the sarah if for her name and it's, a serve called playfair display and it's, actually, I found it available for free, and that will be on the resource list. And it looks really nice large? I think so. I wanted that to be sort of the branding and the focal point and then the rest of the type I set in helvetica and then on the right it's all clinics lab because there's enough variations within that one family where it looks different so you can see her name is a tallis ized her title designer is bold and then the rest is book so if you have one family that you're working with and it has a lot of weights and styles that's all the variation you need otherwise if you're combining typefaces from two families, make sure they have a high contrast another thing that I want to talk about our numbers so when we zoom in on we look at the phone number, you can see that the two are very different from each other so the one on the left his helvetica on the right is clinics lab so these represent two different styles of numbers one is called lining numerals and the other is called old style new rules. So the default is usually aligning numeral, which is great if you're setting columns and tables of numbers and information it's very clear but next to type in context that sort of looks very tall and odd, so if you choose old style numbers over lining numerals it flows better with your text you can see the difference the old style new rules have more of a variation, so some dip below the baseline and that's more akin to how the lower case in the upper case letter forms interact with each other, so sands there's usually don't come with an old style numeral option, but most sarah ifs do, and you can get to that option through the open tight menu and I'll be showing you how to access that in the demo. So this is what it looks like in context and as I mentioned, if you have all lower case and suddenly you go to these lining new rules, it just it looks too tall, so what you can do is choose a sarah typeface instead and choose the lining numeral style, and those are the options you want to go for when they're available so it just these little type things may seem little, but they really add up and they really improve ledge ability. So the typeface is here with the old sound new rules are karen bond and clinics lab, and so you're probably saying to yourself, where do I find good typefaces? You know, I have all these on my computer, some of them I'm never going to use or never will use first you want to develop an eye for what makes a good typeface, so read books about type I really love I'm thinking with type by ellen lupton. Very easy to read very informative talks about all of the characteristics of quality typefaces. So then you start to recognize those and see the difference between good and bad design pontes also, you know, work with what you have. You don't need to spend a ton of money on fancy fonts if you have helvetica and gary mon that's enough, those air both grade when you are ready to purchase a typeface you want to buy from an established foundry, so make sure that the designer of the typeface read their bio see where they went to school. See what other typefaces air available read user ratings aa lot of times founders will also allow you to download a test run so you get one weight of a typeface and you can sort of try it out and see if you like it and then take the plunge and invest. Um, please pay for your fonts do not steal your funds sponsors so hard to make and people little put a lot of time and energy into crafting them. So you really want to respect that? Pay for your funds and there's so many options out there now for very affordable fun families, so please pay for your phones.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Hey Lara! I just checked out your course on CL, How to Design Business Cards, and absolutely loved it! Everything about the course was awesome from content, information, presentation, and your personality. Would you please do more courses? You have a wealth on knowledge, I can tell, and with your easy-going presentation it is a great combo. I would love you to do a course on InDesign or simply on design with various projects from business cards, posters, brochures, etc. Anyway, thank you for that course. You rock! Thank you for your time.
a Creativelive Student
I'm designing my first business card and Lara took it step by step so clearly that I've got something I can be proud of right out of the gate. She showed great strategies to make them professional and attractive and bonus ideas about how to get people to keep them around for reference. That's pure genius!
Sara C. Madsen
Great, little course. Inspiring.