The Art of Choosing Fonts:
Why Your Typography Is Doing More Than You Think
— notes from a self confessed font whore.
I have a confession.
I’m a Font Whore. There, I Said It.
I lose time in font libraries the way other people lose time on Pinterest. I’ll sit down to pick a heading font for a client brand and resurface forty-five minutes later having test-driven seventeen options, sent three screenshots to nobody in particular, and fallen deeply, inappropriately in love with at least two typefaces I have zero business using right now.
I’m a font whore. I own it completely.
I collect fonts like Imelda Marcos collected shoes.
But here’s the thing — it’s not frivolous. Fonts are doing something before a single word is read. The moment someone lands on your website, your Instagram grid, your proposal document — they feel your type before they process it. Your font is your handshake, your posture, your opening line.
And most people are choosing theirs like they’re picking a grocery store receipt font.
Functional. Forgettable. Fine.
‘Serif vs. Sans-Serif’
and why it actually matters.
Let’s start at the beginning, because this distinction does more work than most people realize.
A serif font has those small finishing strokes — the little “feet” — at the ends of each letterform. Think of the classic newspaper, the law firm letterhead, the beautifully typeset book. Serifs carry history. They feel traditional, established, grounded. They whisper trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while. Used well, they bring a kind of quiet authority and warmth that’s hard to fake.
A sans-serif has none of those strokes — it’s clean, modern, unadorned. Think tech companies, minimalist brands, contemporary design studios. Sans-serifs say I’m precise. I’m current. I don’t need the ornamentation. They read as efficient, forward-facing, sometimes a little cooler to the touch.
Neither is better. Both have their place.
The question is: which one sounds like your brand when it speaks?
A wellness practitioner who works with a slow, holistic approach might reach for a soft serif — something that feels hand-crafted and considered. A digital strategist with a sharp, modern edge might choose a geometric sans that communicates precision and clarity. Two completely different businesses. Two completely different visual conversations.
And then there’s the pairing. Heading font meets body font the way a blazer meets a t-shirt — one does the statement work, the other keeps things readable and easy. Mix a decorative serif headline with a clean sans body and you get editorial warmth. Mix two competing display fonts and you get visual noise. The dance only works when each partner knows their role
The logo/font conversation nobody has.
Here’s something I watch people get wrong all the time: they fall in love with the font in their logo and try to use it for everything. Body copy, captions, slide decks, email headers.
Your logo font is not your everyday font. It’s a costume, not a wardrobe. It’s built for one specific job — to sit inside a mark, at a specific size, doing one thing beautifully. Take that same display font and run a paragraph of body copy through it at 10pt, and suddenly your beautifully branded PDF looks like a ransom note.
Logo fonts are often highly decorative, condensed, or stylized in ways that serve a graphic context but fall apart in running text. Use them for what they’re designed for — your mark, your headers, the occasional pull quote — and then let a clean, legible workhorse font handle everything else.
The rule that is never optional;
No matter how beautiful, how distinctive, how perfectly on-brand your font choice is — if it cannot be read easily, it is not doing its job.
Decorative is Wonderful. Illegible is not.
If you have to squint, if the letters blur into each other at smaller sizes, if someone has to work to read your words — the font is getting in the way of the communication. And communication is always the point.
This applies especially to scripts and hand-lettered styles, which can look gorgeous as accents but become genuinely painful as body copy. Use them with intention. Sparingly. As the cherry, not the whole cake.
And if you’re ever second-guessing whether your type is reading clearly — especially in a document that matters, a launch page, a proposal — ask someone to proofread it fresh. Not for the words. For the reading experience. Can they move through it easily? Does anything make them pause or strain? A second set of eyes on legibility is never a waste of time.
The weekend the obsession got expensive. In the best way.
I will fully admit that this particular rabbit hole led somewhere real recently. I spent the better part of a weekend adjusting the typography across my entire website. Not because it was broken. Not because anyone complained. Because once I knew what I was looking for, I couldn’t unsee what wasn’t quite right.
And honestly? It was fun. That’s the part I’m not even slightly embarrassed about.
The new pairing feels so much more like me — like a well-read editorial magazine that’s been handled and considered and quietly, deliberately assembled. Luxe without announcing itself. I chose Essential Sans for the body and navigation because of its range of font weights and — crucially — because it holds up beautifully as a paragraph. It’s one thing for a font to look stunning in a headline. It’s another thing entirely for it to stay readable and elegant when it’s doing the quiet, essential work of carrying actual sentences. That’s why I chose it over Figura Sans, which I also love — but Figura reads sharper, more clinical, more here are your quarterly projections. Essential Sans says I’ve thought about this carefully, and here’s what I’d suggest. Same words. Completely different energy.
For the display work — the headlines, the big moments — I chose Editors Note Display. The weight options drew me in first. But it was the uber crisp endpoints on the letterforms that made me commit. There’s something in that sharp, deliberate finish that pulls at an older part of my creative brain — the part that discovered letterpress printing and gum bichromate at ACAD and has never fully recovered. Good typography, at its best, still feels like craft. Like something was made with intention and a little obsession.
While I was at it — because of course I was — I cleaned up the font hierarchy across the whole site and made most sections universal. One cohesive system instead of a patchwork of individual decisions that had accumulated over time. It’s a small thing that has a real effect: fewer font calls means less for a reader’s browser to load, which means the site moves faster and feels lighter. The aesthetics and the function ended up serving exactly the same goal. That, I have to say, was satisfying in a deeply specific way.
Always, try before you buy
Any font library worth your time will have a preview tool where you can type your own words and see the font in action. Not the alphabet. Not “The quick brown fox.” Your actual headline. Your tagline. Your name.
Because your business name in a display font hits entirely differently than the same words in a utility sans. And you don’t know which one is you until you see it working.
Type in your words. Change the size. See how it sits next to your logo mark. See how it behaves at small scale on a phone screen. A gorgeous font that becomes illegible at 12pt is a gorgeous font that’s working against you.
Your type pairing — heading, subheading, body — is one of the most quietly powerful decisions in your visual brand. Get it right and your content feels cohesive, considered, intentional. Get it wrong and nothing quite clicks, even when the photos are beautiful and the copy is good.
It’s worth the forty-five minutes. I promise. (Even if you fall in love with two fonts you have no business using right now. Those go on the list for later.)
If this post made you look at your own brand with slightly squinted eyes — good.
That instinct is worth listening to.
Before you change a single thing, I’d encourage a fresh set of eyes on what you already have. Sometimes a small, considered tweak is all it takes. Sometimes it’s a full typography weekend like mine. The Brand Glow-Up Guide will walk you through that audit at your own pace, in your own time — self-guided, no pressure, genuinely useful.
Or, if you’d rather skip straight to a library of done-for-you Canva templates with all the fonts already chosen, pre-embedded, and ready to use — that’s what the Content Collective is for. No font rabbit holes required. Unless you want one. In which case, welcome. Pull up a chair.
→ Explore the Brand Glow-Up Guide
→ Take a look inside the Content Collective.
Yours in creativity,
Annemarie
