Top Typography Trends Every Designer Should Know
This decade has been really hectic in terms of web design. With the mobile revolution, everything seems to be changing, rather evolving. Typography has been one of the fields that has shown immense growth and new trends.
Typography is a crucial aspect in web design. Just like the right images and photos make your designs stand out, so does the fonts. One wrong font can make your design stand out, but in a bad way.
Typography has seen huge changes, thanks to mobile devices. Google, Apple, Amazon has introduced their own typefaces in an attempt to cope up with the shift. Amazon specifically designed a typeface for their Kindle devices, called Bookerly. Apple’s custom typeface San Francisco was introduced with Apple Watch and Google also launched the typeface Product Sans to respond to the changing needs of web.
With all that in consideration, let’s look at the top typography trends for the year 2016 and beyond. Some of the noticeable trends are as follows:
- Custom Typefaces
- Extreme sizes (large and small)
- Superimposed on images
- Serif typefaces
- Artistic fonts
If you don’t want to read through the details, you can check out this infographic on Pinterest.
Top Typography Trends in 2016 and beyond
Custom Typefaces
As I mentioned earlier, everyone is introducing their own typeface. A custom typeface if designed the right way has the potential to improve your brand’s identity and character. It makes you stand out of the crowd and that’s what everyone wants.
Within the custom typeface world, there are a lot of approaches that are catching up fast. Generally, custom typefaces are introduced to cater to the changing need of the hour. Like what Google, Apple or Amazon did.
Designing your very own typeface has some challenges to it. The look out the typeface should match with the personality of your brand, it should be used sparingly as overusing will dilute its significance, it should be compatible with all the device resolutions.
There are tools available to create custom typefaces,like the Glyphs App which provides basic functionalities to design a custom typeface.
Extreme Sizes (large and small)
Extreme font sizes have been trending lately. Basically, this trend is to use extreme sizes to convey the message. Large font size is used to highlight and create an impact and small fonts alongside it are used to further explain the message.
Some people might be afraid of implementing this trend, but I would suggest you should give it a try.
You can also go small fonts, but they should be combined with hero or large images.
The above site uses medium and small fonts to convey their message with a beautiful hero image to go with.
The large and small typography techniques are work individually and many-a-times in tandem with each other. When using large typography technique, select an oversized type and gradually scale down to a size that works. In the process, you may also find yourself using a much bigger sized font than you guessed.
Small typography works well with hero and large sized images. As they don’t overshadow other elements on the screen. You should use contrasting colors while using small fonts.
Superimposed on images
This trend came into limelight because of social media. Most of the memes and quotes are designed this way only. And you just can’t miss looking at them, they are so interesting. This trend quickly got introduced in typography.
While implementing this type of typography, you need to consider a few points. Contrast plays a very important role in it. You need to make your text stand out of the image yet subtly integrate into it. You need to also check the position of the text as it should not be an hindrance to anything on the image. A designer also need to check break points for different device resolutions.
Serif Typefaces
Although, sans serif typefaces rule the typography world right now, we have seen a lot of designers using serif typefaces. This directly refers to the fact that serif typefaces are making a comeback.
We saw a downfall in the use of serif typefaces earlier because of low-resolution limitations, but now that the hardware is readily available on smartphones, we will see refined serif typefaces being used more often.
As we will see the rise in usage of mobile devices, serif typefaces will get a more prominent place in typography.
Artistic Fonts
Sometimes we don’t need the normal typefaces, but we need something really out of the box. That’s when artistic fonts come into picture. Text written in such fonts are a visual delight and more of a web element than a typeface. One thing to take into consideration is that, this style of font is not for everyone, but if it is for you, then don’t miss out on using it.
This strategy has been there for centuries and is highly common in advertising posters. This strategy lead to legibility and deemphasis of the text message. However, if used properly and limit it to only headlines, it could do wonders.
Artistic typefaces should be used responsibly as they are not for everyone and have certain drawbacks.
Conclusion
Well, these were the top typography trends in 2016 that have the most impact on typography world. However, there are also many noteable changes you need to look at, like – watercolor fonts, image-over-text, mix and match, etc..
If you have any suggestions, you’d like us to add us to the list, please share with us in the comments section.
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