Simple Typography Tricks with Mundane Fonts

Choosing the right font can be a daunting task, but it gives you a lot of creative freedom. What if you’re working on a project where a client has already selected a font for you? It could be a corporate font, or just something that they like. When the client has chosen a really boring font, you might find that it stifles your creativity and you’ll be pulling your hair out trying to make it work with your design. Worry not, here’s a handy little guide with simple typography tricks to make mundane fonts interesting.

For demonstration purposes, in this article, I’ll be using the most boring font of all – Arial – and an even more boring tagline “The Condensation of Water”. Let’s see what we can do!

Play With Colors

Arial might be a pretty unappealing font. However, with a bit of color, you can make the title come to life. Here I’ve chosen a pleasant blue to color “Water” with, to make it stand out as the key subject of focus. I’ve also given a grey tint to the other words to make them a bit more interesting than having them all in black.

All Caps/No Caps

You can convey different emotions by merely switching your caps lock on or off. All-caps can be used as a warning message, or merely to emphasise that something is very important or serious. All-lowercase, on the other hand, give off a feeling of subtlety, elegance, and modernity. Logotypes use all-caps or all-lowercase all the time, so you can always try the same thing with your typography.

Varying Sizes

Subtle changes in the size of different words in your headline can help place emphasis in an interesting way. Increasing a word’s size makes it louder and more noticeable, while purposefully making something smaller can make it seem like a quiet secret shared between you and the viewer.

Italics and Bold

Another way you can switch things up is by using the classic technique of bold/italics. Bolded words stand out and have emphasis. Using bold on a colored word really brings out the color and can be visually pleasing. Italicising should be used sparingly, as it usually signifies speed and urgency. It can be used for emphasis (see what I did there?), but bolding usually works better.

Stretching and Compressing

Don’t be afraid to play around with the transform tool without holding on to shift. Sometimes, a little bit of warping can give text a nice, unique character as long as you don’t overdo it. Going back to the example of “The Condensation of Water”, compressing the words bring out the physical characteristic of condensation, while stretching them out mimics the downward flow of water.

Play with Leading

Finally, leading (the space between the words and letters) can be manipulated to achieve certain visual effects. Spacing letters out gives the text an old-school, almost vaporwave aesthetic. Packing them together can be used to physically demonstrate certain words such as “condensation”, or just to save that bit of precious space on your canvas.