They tend to communicate a more modern and playful approach. These fonts tend to be seen as more contemporary and cutting-edge. Sans means “without.” So sans serif fonts are literally, fonts without serifs. That’s because serifs are easier to read at smaller scales because the they help readers to distinguish letterforms more easily. Or as designer Madeline DeCotes says, you may want to choose a serif if your printed text will be small. Because they are often used by newspapers, they feel more classical and historical.īranding agent Robyn Young says serif fonts might be a good choice if you “want to be seen as trustworthy, established, and reliable.” You might also choose to use a serif font if you want your reader to stick with you longer because you have a large amount of printed text, as research from Cognition Today shows. Traditionally, serif fonts communicate professionalism, formality, and sophistication. So the font that you choose helps to create a mood or feeling which should be consistent with your purpose and content. It’s important to remember that your font is part of your communication. For example, on this page, the text is a sans serif font, but the large title at the top of the page is a serif font. This evolved into deliberately adding smaller strokes in more regular, artful ways, and those decorative strokes became an expected part of the letters.” So serif fonts are those with little lines that come off of the letters. Their origins are a mystery one theory suggests they arose when scribes using brushes or quills left small marks with the writing implement as they finished each stroke. They say, “Serifs are the small lines attached to letters. SerifĪdobe gives a great definition and brief history of serifs. So today, we’ll run through a crash course on one of the fundamentals of choosing a font: whether to use a serif or sans serif font. It can often feel like a shot in the dark. Finally we chose one we both agreed on, but I think it was mostly exhaustion that drove our decision.įont choice is one of those things that seems to immobilize anyone who isn’t a graphic designer. Minutes turned into hours as we tried option after option after option. It was going great until it came time to decide on the font. We were using a design program called Canva. And about a month ago, my fiancé and I sat down to start designing our wedding invitation.

Decorative serif fonts