Typefaces come in all shapes and sizes, and much like smells and sounds, have the power to conjure emotions, meanings, and correlations. But instead of being paralyzed by the overwhelming number of typefaces in your drop-down menu — or worse, inadvertently misrepresenting the information with an uninformed typeface choice — peruse the following guide to help navigate these sometimes confusing waters.

CLASSIFICATIONS

The contents of a typography library can be broken down into four primary classifications: serifs, sans serifs, scripts, and decorative typefaces. Before delving into the sea of available typefaces, start by understanding the types and generally accepted uses of each classification.

• Sans Serifs are best recognized by their lack of ornamentation. With the advent of the internet and ever-evolving printing techniques, sans serifs are used consistently in almost every capacity due to their easy legibility at nearly every size. Sans serifs are most effective at quickly and concisely displaying information to the reader without any underlying emotional or visual triggers. Designers have also adopted the sans serifs’ simplicity to create a modern or minimalist feel when relevant to the design of their project. On the flipside, take extra care when using a sans serif for identity or branding efforts. The lack of decoration leaves little to brand as specific to one company or a visual identity. Common Sans Serifs: Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Futura, Franklin Gothic, Gill Sans, and Univers
• 

• Serifs, in the most basic form, are a sans serif typeface with small finishing strokes at the beginning and end of each letter stroke. Serifs are commonly used as the default typeface by nearly everybody from the average email user to professional designers. From the design perspective, serif typefaces are often used for body copy because it is widely believe that the smooth arcs help lead the eye easily through large amounts of text. They are also a good choice for business and formal correspondence, marketing materials, and myriad media due to the under current of credibility and professionalism they project. Within this classification, there is a subset know as slab serifs, which feature block-like, heavy serifs that do not naturally run into or join to the next letter. Due to their weight, slab serifs should predominantly be used for headlines. Common Serifs: Times New Roman, Georgia, Book Antiqua, Garamond, Century Schoolbook, and Bookman (Common Slab Serifs: Courier and Rockwell)
  

• Script typefaces are modeled after handwriting, and are often used to introduce a human feeling or connection to the reader. Varying from child-like scribbles and chalk letters to elegant calligraphy, script typefaces are effective at introducing fun or sophistication to a computer-generated piece. Scripts are most often used in formal, or decidedly informal projects (see the example below). Scripts rule the world of personal design from invitations to announcements. However, the use of scripts in corporate design should be minimal, as they do not project authority and reliability. Common Scripts: Comic Sans, Monotype Corsiva, Mistral, Lucinda Handwriting, and Brush Script
  
  

• Decorative (also known as ornamental or display) typefaces typically fall into the serif category due to their highly ornamental nature. As their name indicates, they are highly decorative and best used to create or reinforce design styles and themes in large sizes (such as headlines). Their otherwise unique letter shape can be refreshing and attention getting. They can also be used to mimic the emotions and aesthetic of a specific genre or time frame. However, the intricate strokes often used to create these typefaces make them undesirable for use in large amounts of text or at smaller sizes, and therefore are not ideal for body copy.  Avoid using highly decorative typefaces in news or business reports, as they tend to detract from the neutrality for which most organizations strive. Be wary of over using a decorative typeface, or choosing a one inappropriate to the subject matter.
  
  

CONVENTIONS

When choosing typefaces its important to keep in mind the established conventions for the medium at hand. This is not to say that conventions cannot be broken — after all, design s all about breaking rules — but its important to know what the rules are before breaking them.

Websites and online projects require a typeface’s compatibility with the largest common denominator of computers, which usually necessitates the use of otherwise familiar or commonly used typefaces. As such, web standards have been quickly been defined with the use of a sans serif for body copy paired with a serif, script, or decorative typeface for headlines and subheads.

The opposite can be said for print pieces. It has become the collective opinion of most designers that the smooth arc and small leading lines of serifs helps the eye move comfortably through large amounts of text, and as a result, the serif has become the champion of body copy. In recent years, studies have proven that though serifs are not necessarily easier to read, rather our eyes are trained early on to believe they are. From this point the classic nature versus nurture paradox exists. Whatever the case, serifs remain the universal choice for body copy.

CUSTOMIZATION AND STYLING

To further customize or illustrate your intent, try playing with variations of weight (regular, medium, bold, heavy), width (narrow, condensed, extended), italics, outline stroke, and color. The adjustment of any of these components can severely alter the visual cues your typeface relays to the reader.

AVOID OVERUSE

Finally, and this can never be said enough — think twice before using the following typefaces: Comic Sans, Curlz, Papyrus, and Times New Roman. This is not an editorial on their quality or usefulness in the proper context. When observed in a vacuum, each font has its merits. Unfortunately, the designer needs to account for all external influences and these fonts have been overused to the point that even the most unobservant passerby can probably identify them by name. The last thing a designer wants when presenting information is to allow the message to be obscured by the typeface.

When choosing typefaces, classifications and best practices should merely be a guide to jumpstart the creative process. Good Luck!

Graphic designers understand their way around the Internet. With branding and graphic design becoming more and more important for companies, it is also becoming more highly competitive. To keep up with new software, new techniques and trends, graphic designers read design publications and network online at forums, blogs and design communities. One of the ways design websites encourage traffic is to offer designer freebies. Free fonts are an excellent way to offer valuable content and motivate graphic designers to subscribe to what the site has to offer.

Quality fonts are easy to come by, if you are willing to pay for them. However, signing up for the right blogs and forums could help you build your font database for free. There are plenty of websites that deliver all kinds of free fonts as long as you remain a subscriber.

Who doesn’t love free? Even if it is not a font you have a need for right now, having it in your font library could be beneficial for designs in the future. Even if the font is not attractive at first glance, there could be a design at some point that the font is the perfect accompaniment for.

Of course, for every positive there is a negative. The danger with storing and using free fonts is that a free font is much more likely to be overused than a font that designers need to invest in. An overused font is one you can recognize at a glance. If you see a font and can label it as Times Roman, Arial or Verdana, then that font is too common.

There are also fonts that are ridiculed in the design industry. It is important to understand what these are as well. If you are going to use a font like Comic Sans, you better have a really great reason. This font is evokes unfair, but fairly common disgust in the design community. Research a font before you use it to get some feedback about how the design is perceived in the community. Just because someone states that the free font is fun, new, creative and unique – does not make it so.

Also there is some confusion regarding just how free a font really is. There is a difference between a font and a typeface. The font is often offered as free, which means designers are allowed to use it in their designs. However, the typeface is still under copyright protection for the designer who created it. This means the font should not be edited or changed in any way. Some of the free fonts might have a licensing agreement that allows it to only be used privately, which means commercial design for the font is not okay. The majority of the freeware fonts are only free for personal use. Understanding the terms of usage for each font, free or not, is an essential part of using fonts in graphic design.

Another challenge that needs to be taken into consideration is the availability of free fonts. Even with millions of fonts available, it can be difficult for graphic designers to be free to use whatever font best works for them. The reason is that design is often restricted to fonts that the audience has available on their computer. If the targeted audience does not have the font loaded on their machine, the design might not be able to be read or will display incorrectly. Spending hours selecting the right colors, symbols, text and font might come to nothing if the end user is seeing something different than what you have designed.

So, now you are stuck with choosing between fonts that are readily available to your audience but that are not overused and tired. This makes selecting a font not only important, but also potentially frustrating. A great designer can find a way to include the chosen fonts as images so that they show up regardless of what fonts are installed on the receiving computer.

For graphic designers who do not understand the intricate nature of typesetting and font design, it is important to spend some time studying fonts. Designers need to understand the differences in serif and sans serif fonts, what makes a font and a typeface, what fonts are overused and how to balance different fonts. Without this knowledge, the fonts you think are wonderful may not send out the impression you were going for. There are plenty of free fonts available and adding them to your collection for future use is a good idea. However, understanding fonts and typography will stretch out the value of those free fonts even further.

It is always impressive how many useful and free web apps and tools there are for web designers, and today’s fresh selection is just that – very impressive. The Aloha Editor is especially impressive, with its unique live editing features. And there is also CSS3 Pie which will make all CSS3 properties viewable in all versions of IE (it really does!). If you have the time we recommend you take a look at these tools.

Aloha Editor – The HTML5 Editor

Aloha Editor allows you to edit content you would never imagine you can. It is the world's first full featured Editor that allows you to edit dynamic content live and in place.
Aloha Editor – The HTML5 Editor

1dl.us – Your all-in-one tool site

1dl.us is a useful all-in-one resource, that feature URL shortening, Upload Pics, Pastebin and a Password utility.
1dl.us – Your all-in-one tool site

CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE

PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties.
CSS3 PIE: CSS3 decorations for IE

FontFonter

FontFonter uses custom CSS and other techniques to temporarily replace a site’s font styles with Web FontFonts.
FontFonter

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Today’s news focuses on only one single design resource… and what a FREE resource it is! It is The User Interface Design Framework from webalys.com, which is basically a huge design framework that consists of a complete GUI library, a set of of 260 minimal vector icons and a massive Illustrator style library. This is a must have resource for any professional designer.

License: The framework has been released as a complete web designer kit for free, even for commercial use.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework
You can view the details of the framework below:

GUI Library

The GUI elements are based on common interface patterns (accordion, expandable panel, progress bar, tags, slide show…), that integrate usability good practices and are perfect for wireframes and interface design.

Vector Icons Library – 260 Minimal Icons for Free

This pixel precise icon collection have been created specifically for interface and web designers. They are based on a precise 16 pixels grid, which means that they stay clear and have a crisp look even at small sizes.

Graphic Styles Library

The Graphic Styles Library consists of 200 graphic styles for buttons, navigation menus or panels and 330 swatches harmonized with graphic styles for backgrounds, typography and other GUI interface elements.

You can download the UI Design Interface here: User Interface Design Framework

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

Limiting your design range to reusing the same font on project after project doesn't go for making a decent body of work. It is essential that all designers have a good library of fonts that they can rely upon. Unfortunately, a lot of the best fonts are pretty expensive for freelance designers, and as such we have listed below the best and freshest font collections that we could find to help you out.

40 Free Fonts Ideal For Retro And Vintage Designs

Vintage and retro style designs can be a beautiful thing. By using a combination of rough textures, grungy patterns and brushes meant to add a scratched or used appearance, designers can easily pull of the antique look. To compliment this aged appearance, it is important to use the proper typography to help match the style you are trying to represent. To help you out, this article has a collection of 40 attractive retro and vintage fonts to use in your designs.
40 Free Fonts Ideal For Retro And Vintage Designs

20 Fresh High Quality Free Fonts

In this selection, from Smashing Mag, they present the new free fonts Kilogram, Adelle, Ayita Pro, Hattori Hanzo Typeface, Andron, Tertre, Luxi Sans, Sapir, Otari and a few more. Please read the license agreements carefully before using the fonts — the licenses can change from time to time.
20 Fresh High Quality Free Fonts

100 Fantastically Free Business Fonts

In this post you’ll find some great serif and sans-serif fonts that are perfect for use in situations involving small to medium sized business clients (in other words, they didn’t include any fonts that make you want to cringe or that you’d be embarrassed to work with).
100 Fantastically Free Business Fonts

50 High Quality Funky and Groovy Fonts for Your Designs

50 High Quality Funky and Groovy Fonts for Your Designs

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboyand speckyboy@twitter).

A couple of days Google introduced the Google Font API and Google Font Directory to everybody.

The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using any font in the Google Font Directory on your web page.

The fonts have all the advantages of normal text: in addition to being richer visually, text styled in web fonts is still searchable, scales crisply when zoomed, and is accessible to users using screen readers.

Here are some Google Font API resources to help get you started:

What are the Google Font API and the Google Font Directory?

The Google Font API helps you add web fonts to any web page, and the Google Font Directory give developers a selection of high-quality fonts when using the Font API.
Google Code Blog: Introducing the Google Font API & Google Font Directory
What are the Google Font API and the Google Font Directory?

Getting Started with the Google Font API
This guide explains how to use the Google Font API to add web fonts to your pages. You don't need to do any programming; all you have to do is add a special stylesheet link to your HTML document, then refer to the font in a CSS style.

Google Font Directory

The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and served by Google servers.
Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

This tool allows you to preview and sample any of the Google fonts from its directory.
Google Font Previewer

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Is there no end to CSS3s possibilities? In the past, would you have even considered the idea of generating a font based on an icon set, and then embedding it via @fontface? Or, even better, would you have thought it possible to create icons using only CSS and HTML? I didn't think so…

Ever Thought About Using @Font-face for Icons?

With the advent of font embedding and the realization that fonts are essentially a series of simple vector glyphs. Conceptually, if you placed all required icons for a particular site into a custom font, you would then be able to use those icons anywhere on the site with the option to change the size and color, add backgrounds, shadows and rotation, and just about anything else CSS will allow for text.
Ever Thought About Using @Font-face for Icons?

Font-Embedding Icons: This Is a Big Deal

From P.J. Onori's (resource author) view, it seems like the Font-Embedding Icons are the way forward. So, he generated a font set based on his personal icon set Iconic, and writes further about how to implement the icons and why we should all be using this method for displaying icons.
Font-Embedding Icons: This Is a Big Deal

Pure CSS Icons

As an experiment Zander Martineau built a set of pure CSS Icons, using lots of CSS3, border-radius being the most obvious but also rotation, gradients and transform (for when an icon is hovered over) and all dimensions are em-based so that all you have to do to change the size of the icon is just change the font-size of their containing element.
Pure CSS Icons

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Typically, in graphic design, type will only have a supporting role or a bit-part of the overall design, merely a small ingredient of the overall design. That is not always case, sometimes type will be projected into the forefront, and the result can be amazing, powerful and very, very effective, as you can see from below.

40 Beautiful Typography Inspiration

40 Beautiful Typography Inspiration

20 Eye-catching Examples of Typography in Movie Posters

20 Eye-catching Examples of Typography in Movie Posters

Typography Showcase At Its Best – 68 Creations

Typography Showcase At Its Best – 68 Creations

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

You will probably have your own traditional methods for finding useful design information and resources, but you can’t beat studying a well crafted and creative info-graphic, and if it teaches you something interesting or if it is helpful and insightful in any way, then its even better.

Below you will find three more info-graphics for designers.

Colours In Cultures

What colour is happiness in China? Or good luck in Africa? Or anger in Eastern Europe? Are any color meanings universal across cultures and continents?

Colors In Cultures is a visualization of the meanings of different colours in different cultures by David McCandless and AlwaysWithHonor.com.
Colours In Cultures

So You Need A Typeface (Flowchart)

Choosing the perfect font for any project can be difficult, this flowchart certainly more than tries to help with a touch of humor.
So You Need A Typeface (Flowchart)

HTML5 and CSS3 Readiness

The browsers are grouped into color schemes based on their underlying rendering engine – e.g. all Firefox versions are shades of blue, Chrome/Safari – yellow, IE – pink. Each ray also has a different background color if it is a CSS3 feature.

Each browser is represented with a tile on the bar and gets an equal width of space, so if you see a bar that is full, that means that feature has universal support among all the 8 browsers.
HTML5 and CSS3 Readiness

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).

Choosing the perfect font can be one of the most difficult aspects of design. You will probably use one font for the logo, another for the headings and yet another for the content. And on top of that each design you create will have its own character and the font you choose will need to compliment it. Just how do you find that perfect font for that particular design?

For today’s news round-up we have collected the best and the freshest font collections to expand your font libraries and help you choose that perfect font.

30 Free Fonts Ideal for Business Logos

30 Free Fonts Ideal for Business Logos »

20 Fonts Ideal for Big and Powerful Headings

20 Fonts Ideal for Big and Powerful Headings »

7 Free Grunge Fonts That Rock

7 Free Grunge Fonts That Rock »

20 Fonts Ideal For The iPhone And Other Mobile Screens

20 Fonts Ideal For The iPhone And Other Mobile Screens »

A Roundup of 45 Industrial Free Fonts

A Roundup of 45 Industrial Free Fonts »

The 30 Most Creative and Unusual Fonts

The 30 Most Creative and Unusual Fonts »

By Paul Andrew (Speckyboy and speckyboy@twitter).