Typography

In design, there’s a whole specialisation called typography. Typography is the art and technique of designing and arranging letters to make written language readable, legible, and visually appealing. The typeface is the actual design of the letters themselves - for example, Arial or Helvetica — while a font is a specific style, weight, and size of that typeface, like Arial Bold 12pt. So essentially, typography is the craft, type/typeface is the letter design, and fonts are the tools you use to bring that design to life. But it’s also perfectly normal in practice to describe typeface as a font.

Typography isn’t just about style; it’s also about legibility, which can change depending on whether your design is for print or digital, scaled up or very small. Some typefaces read beautifully on screen but become difficult to read in print, and vice versa, so choosing the right type for the medium is key to clear communication.

Pro tip: When using different weights of a font, try to use the actual bold or italic version created by the type designer (if possible), for example, Montserrat Bold. Don’t just click ‘bold’ or ‘italic’ in Canva or Word, because this just fakes the effect. The designer-crafted weights are balanced and visually appealing. The small details like this can make a difference in the professionalism of your final design.

Typography is an artform in its own right, and we highly recommend creating a Pinterest board dedicated just to type. Each typeface has its own personality, and these personalities bring a vibe to your designs and brands. We call it the ‘vibe,’ though the professional term is ‘look and feel.’

Consistent typography also helps your brand feel cohesive. Mixing too many typefaces will confuse your audience and dilute your brand personality. Most brands stick to:

Header font – for main headings
Body font – for paragraph or body copy
Optional decorative font – we like to introduce a complementary typeface to use across social media or advertising campaigns to add flavour

Take a look at some examples:

Key points to remember:

Each typeface has a vibe, so pick 1–3 fonts that work well together.
Keep fonts consistent across your designs, especially if you’re designing for a company or brand. Like colour, type is a key part of brand cohesion.

Serif vs Sans Serif

One of the first decisions you’ll make is whether to use a serif or sans serif font. Both have distinct characteristics and are suited to different purposes.

Serif Fonts
Serif fonts have small decorative strokes at the ends of each letter, known as ‘serifs.’ These details can give text a classic, elegant, and formal feel, making serif fonts a popular choice for print materials such as books, newspapers, and traditional branding. They also tend to guide the eye along lines of text, which can improve readability in long passages. Times New Roman is a well known serif font.

Sans Serif Fonts
Sans serif fonts, as the name suggests, do not have the decorative strokes. They offer a clean, modern, and minimalistic look. Sans serif fonts are widely used in digital media, signage, and contemporary branding, where clarity and legibility at various sizes are important. Arial is a well known san serif font, or the designers darling, Helvetica.

Choosing Between Serif and Sans Serif
The choice depends on your design’s purpose and tone. Serif fonts often convey tradition and sophistication, while sans serif fonts communicate modernity and simplicity. Many designs combine the two, using serif fonts for headings and sans serif for body text, or vice versa, to create visual contrast and hierarchy.

Serifs are the little finishing strokes at the ends of a letter. They evolved from chisel marks in Roman stone-cutting, which is roughly why serif type still reads as "traditional" two thousand years later.

Decorative Fonts

Decorative fonts, sometimes called display or novelty fonts, are designed to stand out and convey a specific mood or style. They often have unique shapes, exaggerated features, or artistic flourishes. While decorative fonts can add personality and impact, they should generally be used sparingly, such as in headings, logos, or posters, rather than for long blocks of text.

Font Faux Pas

Typography can make or break a design. Using the wrong font can send the wrong message, make your design look unprofessional, or even distract from your content. These mistakes are often referred to as font faux pas.

One of the most famous examples is Comic Sans. Designed in 1994 by Vincent Connare for informal, playful contexts like speech bubbles in software, Comic Sans quickly became overused in inappropriate settings. Its casual, handwritten style works well for children’s materials or comic-style projects, but using it in formal documents, business presentations, or professional branding undermines credibility.

Key Takeaways:

Always match your font to the tone and purpose of your design.
Avoid using fonts that have strong associations with casual or informal contexts when a professional or serious tone is required.
If in doubt, stick with classic serif or sans serif fonts that are versatile and legible.

Font choices communicate personality as much as words do — a careless choice can turn even a well-designed layout into a visual misstep. Comic Sans serves as a cautionary example: a fun font in the wrong context becomes a design faux pas.

Font Weight

Once you’ve chosen your fonts, you can also play with weight to emphasise hierarchy within your longform written content:

Thin – Extremely light strokes, delicate and subtle

Extra Light / Ultra Light – Slightly heavier than Thin, still very light

Light – Lighter than Regular, good for subtle text

Regular / Roman / Book – Standard or default weight for most body text

Medium – Slightly heavier than Regular, adds emphasis without being bold

Semi-Bold / Demi-Bold – Between Medium and Bold, used for subheadings or emphasis

Bold – Thick, strong strokes for emphasis or headings

Extra Bold / Heavy – Heavier than Bold, very strong and attention-grabbing

Black / Ultra / Ultra-Black – The heaviest weight, very dense and impactful

Weight

Regular

ThinBlack

These are the real designed weights of a variable typeface, not the "bold" button. That's the difference the pro tip above is talking about — a faked bold just smears the outline outwards.

Technical considerations:

Some fonts don’t translate well from print to digital.
Some fonts may be expensive to licence for certain uses.
If needed, pick similar-looking fonts across platforms to maintain consistency.

Where to find fonts:

Google Fonts – free, works for print and digital
Creative Market – great for distinctive, paid fonts (check licenses) creativemarket.com/fonts
Dafont – free for personal use dafont.com
What The Font – a handy tool that identifies fonts from screenshots myfonts.com/pages/whatthefont

Programs like Adobe or Canva come with lots of fonts built in, and both allow custom fonts to be uploaded.

Advanced typography considerations:

Kerning

Kerning is the art of adjusting the space between individual letters in a word so that it feels balanced and harmonious. Kerning is important because it’s about visual balance, not just following what the computer does automatically.

Most design programs will space letters evenly by default, which seems fine at first glance. But because each letter has a different shape — some are wide, some narrow, some have diagonal strokes or curves — even spacing can look off to the human eye.

Kerning is the process of manually adjusting the space between individual letters so that words feel balanced and harmonious. It prevents awkward gaps or crowded areas that make text harder to read and less polished.

Good kerning ensures that:

Words are more legible and aesthetically pleasing, which is especially critical in print or high-end design work.

Letter spacing looks visually even, even if the actual numeric spacing isn’t equal.

Headlines, logos, and other prominent text feel professional and intentional.

Automatic kerning has been switched off in the demo below, so you’re looking at the raw metrics — the same fixed gap between every pair. The top row is what the font hands you. The bottom row is yours, and there’s one slider per gap, because that’s the actual job: you go pair by pair, and every pair needs a different amount.

The numbers are in 1/1000 of an em — the unit Adobe uses for kerning, so the values you land on here are the values you’d type into InDesign.

WAVE

As the font gives it to you

WAVE

Yours

W A

A V

V E

Units of 1/1000 em

Squint at the word and the gaps should read as equal areas of light. If one is louder than the others, that's the one to fix — and it will nearly always be a pair with a diagonal, a round, or a piece of overhang in it. Straight-sided pairs like H and I almost never need touching.

Adobe products have Kerning tools built in. In Canva, this isn’t available yet, but it’s good to be aware of this concept.

Tip:

Practice with games like this to understand the concept of Kerning and train your eye: method.ac/type

Use Tracking in Canva as a workaround, to try and acheive more balance of space in between letters for headers.

Tracking

Tracking is about setting uniform spacing across a whole word, sentence, or paragraph. Unlike kerning, which adjusts letters individually, tracking adjusts the spacing for a block of text to make it feel open, airy, or compact. Both print and digital designs benefit from thoughtful tracking — too tight and it feels cramped, too loose and it can look disjointed.

Tip: Use tracking to improve readability and overall text flow, especially for headers and body copy blocks.

Tracking is another tool up your sleeve when you’re trying to create more harmony or contrast in your design.

Leading (Line Spacing)

Leading is the space between lines of text. Proper leading helps the reader’s eye move comfortably down a page or screen. Too little space makes text feel crowded; too much can make it feel disjointed.

Tip: Adjust leading based on font size, weight, and the medium (print vs digital) for optimal readability.

Canva has line spacing tools built in.

Six days of morning yoga, nutrition and meal-planning workshops, guided meditation, and herbal tea tastings from our own range. Every session is suitable for beginners.

Tracking

Leading

Tracking is horizontal, leading is vertical, and kerning is the one you do letter by letter. Canva gives you the first two.

Orphans, Widows and Ragged Edges

Orphans and widows are single lines of a paragraph that get stranded at the top or bottom of a page or column. Orphans (first line at the bottom of a page) and widows (last line at the top of a new page) can look messy and disrupt the flow of reading.

Before

Evergreen Wellness has been running workshops from its Cambridge studio since 2019, and this spring marks the sixth year of the programme. Sessions are suitable for complete beginners as well as regular practitioners.

Booking is essential.

Widen the browser and the widow may disappear — which is exactly why this matters more in print than on the web. In a fixed layout, the break is permanent.

Tip: Adjust column width, line breaks, or paragraph spacing to fix them. This is especially important in print layouts like brochures or magazines.

Single word widow: A single word stranded alone at the end of a paragraph line or at the top/bottom of a page. It can feel awkward and disrupts the visual flow of text.

The Ragged Edge

A ragged edge happens because lines end at different points depending on word length.
Uneven spacing or short lines can create distracting gaps and make the paragraph feel jagged.
Large gaps between words or single-word lines at the end (widows) make the raggedness more noticeable.

The rag is hard to see until someone shows it to you. Below, Show the rag paints each line to exactly where it ends — so the jagged edge you’ve been told about becomes a shape you can actually look at. Then move the measure and watch the shape change.

Evergreen Wellness has run workshops from its Cambridge studio since 2019, and this spring marks the sixth year of the programme. Sessions are suitable for complete beginners as well as regular practitioners, and every workshop finishes with a herbal tea tasting from the studio’s own range.

Booking is essential, and places are limited to fourteen people per session so that everyone gets individual attention.

NarrowWide

≈ 62 characters

Justifying doesn't remove the problem, it relocates it — from the right-hand edge into the word spaces. Ragged-right is the safer default for almost everything you'll make; justify only when the measure is wide enough to absorb it, and turn hyphenation on when you do.

How to Fix or Improve the Ragged Edge

Adjust line length: Keep a consistent line width so the ragged edge isn’t extreme. Around 50–75 characters per line is ideal for readability.
Modify word spacing: Small tweaks in tracking or manual line breaks can reduce awkward gaps.
Use hyphenation carefully: Breaking long words across lines can smooth out uneven lines.
Rephrase text: Sometimes a single sentence tweak prevents a short line or awkward break.
Avoid widows: Don’t leave single words stranded at the end of a line—they draw the eye and exaggerate the ragged edge.