Fonts: the two-font rule and friends

Most designs are mostly words. Which means most of design is deciding how words look — and this is where beginners commit their most visible crimes. The good news: the rules are few and they're mechanical.

The two families you must know

Instant guidance: sans-serif for screens and anything modern; serif for long printed text and anything that should feel established (law firm, literary festival, wedding). This single distinction covers most decisions you'll face.

The Two-Font Rule

Here it is — the rule that prevents the most common disaster:

Use at most two fonts per design. One for headlines, one for everything else.

Want variety? Get it from weights of the same font (bold, regular, light) and sizes — not from new fonts. One font family used in three weights looks sophisticated; three font families looks like a ransom note.

A reliable beginner pairing: a bold sans-serif for headlines + the same or a plain sans-serif for body. Genuinely, "one bold + same font regular" is what half the professional world ships daily.

Fonts to simply avoid

Every field has its jokes. In design the punchlines are: Comic Sans, Papyrus, and anything that looks like handwriting, graffiti, or "fun". Not because rules are snobbery — because these fonts carry twenty years of amateur associations that instantly transfer to your work. The exception (children's party invitations) proves the rule.

Also retire: WordArt-style rainbow/3D/outlined text effects. If the words need costumes to be interesting, the words are the problem.

Readability: the mechanical checklist

• Body text size: never below ~16px on screens. If anyone would pinch-zoom, it's too small.
• Line length: 45–75 characters per line. Full-screen-width text is why reading it feels like mowing a lawn.
• Line spacing: roughly 1.4–1.6× the text size. Cramped lines suffocate; this course's lessons use generous spacing, which is partly why they feel easy.
• ALL CAPS: fine for short headlines; hostile for sentences. CAPITALS REMOVE THE WORD-SHAPES YOUR EYE USES TO READ QUICKLY, WHICH IS WHY THIS SENTENCE FEELS LIKE BEING SHOUTED AT.
• Contrast: dark text on light background or vice versa. Grey-on-slightly-different-grey is fashionable and unreadable; your grandmother should be able to read it — literally, that's the test.

Where to get good fonts free

Google Fonts — free for any use, commercial included, and built into Canva and Figma. Safe starting six: Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Lato (sans-serif); Merriweather, Playfair Display (serif). You could use nothing but these six for a year and never look wrong.