I’ve been spending some time on the Etsy forums for the past couple weeks and have been monitoring a thread arguing against using the Papyrus and Comic Sans fonts in your shop banners. The main argument is that these fonts make your banner and your store by extension cheap and unprofessional looking. There were of course some rebuttals by the Papyrus and Comic Sans font lovers and general fur flying and pleas of “Please, can’t we and all of our fonts just get along?
While I’m not a big fan of Comic Sans or Curlz for that matter, I’ve always found a place for them and Papyrus in my font archive. If you’ve seen the movie Avatar or the trailer or at least the movie poster, you’ve seen what looks to be a close cousin of Papyrus being used in the logo…so it can’t be all bad.
Where do I stand on the debate? I’ve designed a number of banners and logos throughout the years and while there are some fonts that I use more than others, there are very few that I would absolutely refuse to consider. When it comes to designing a logo or a web banners, here are some the “rules” that I use:
1. The font you use should fit your brand- This is THE biggest consideration when it comes to designing something for your brand. Whatever you use, must fit the kind of image that you’re trying to portray. In many cases, that might not be Comic Sans or Papyrus, but I’ve seen some pretty good work that have used those fonts. And the reason why those fonts worked in those particular cases is that those fonts were used in a way that fit the brand.
2. It’s not always “what” you use, but “how” you use it- The mark of a great designer is the ability to take just about any material and transform it into something great. If you’re a Project Runway fan, then you’ve probably seen this season’s second challenge where the designers took potato sacks and transformed them from this:
To this:
If you’re designing a banner or logo on a budget, take a look as some of the free font sites like dafont.com. There are literally hundreds of free fonts that you can browse through and experiment with. Download what you like, what appears to fit the image you’re trying to project and play around with them.
Remember to use what you have in fun and different ways. Play around with color, shading, and size. Combine different elements like illustrations, photographs, and special effects to make your plain old simple font into something great.
3. In some cases you might have to consider paying for a font- You have to pay for certain fonts for a reason…it’s because they are usually a higher quality than those that you get for free. The characters are are finely formed, most come with full character choices, including punctuation and other special characters. And many of the paid fonts also have true bold and true italic version instead of the “faux bold” and “faux italic” options you have to use in Microsoft and Photoshop. Therefore your logo or banner looks a bit more professional. There are many projects in which I had to bite the bullet and buy a font because it fit the needs of a project perfectly.
4. Keep it simple- Just like you can take a plain old free font and do something spectacular with it, you can also take a nice paid font and make your banner look like a hot mess. In most cases simple will do much better than something that’s overly worked and complicated. This is especially true if the font itself is fancy or have complicated looking elements. In that case, balance out a heavy or complicated looking font with simple elements, layouts or colors.
5. Keep it readable- This should go without saying, but if you’re making a banner or a logo that contains the name of your business, anyone looking at it should be able to actually read it. Don’t sacrifice readability for style.
6. Keep an eye on what everyone else is using- Just like everything else, fonts seem to go in and out of popularity. So keep your eyes peeled as to what kind of fonts designers seem to be using. If you see a font that you love, then you can find out what it is by going to What the Font! If you want to seem trendy and up to date, keeping up with the trends might be good for you. On the other hand, if you want to be unique and want to stand out a bit, you might want to do the opposite and pull an old but perfectly great font out of the mothballs.
7. When in doubt…take it to a professional- If you don’t know what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter what font you’re using. Some artists can easily take their design expertise and make some perfectly beautiful logos and banners. Some can’t. If you’re in the latter group and nothing you try looks right, then get a graphic designer to help you. Getting a professionally designed Etsy or blog banner shouldn’t set you back too much. I typically charge between $40 to $50 for a blog banner. So you can look for folks in that price range and you’ll get something that looks nicer and less stress inducing.
So where do you stand on the great font debate? Is there a font you love or one that you love to hate? Drop me a comment and let me know!
Throughout the week, I like to share interesting links for artists on my Twitter profile. Here is a list of the links I tweeted about last week:
Link shortening services has been around for quite a while, but their use has positively exploded since social networking services like Twitter and Facebook has become popular.
If you’re a Gmail user, you might have seen a new option pop up under your Inbox. 
