Get your company noticed

When given the opportunity to design a logo or business card, your first goal is to stand out. How does one achieve this? Not using a boring serif font is for sure.


You need to use fonts that stray from the norm. Bold, expressive, readable, and will grab anyone's attention. When observing popular logos and business cards, you will often notice they are sans-serif fonts. Not necessarily common sans-serifs, but often reworked and expressive one. 


Sans-serifs are bold, simplistic, and . Are those not all the things you look for your logo?

Luke Lucas is an excellent typographer and illustrator. This poster show his amazing abilities to incorporate both of those skills in to one design...Pretty impressive if you ask me.

Bored with Gotham Typeface? – A few alternatives to consider

No doubt Gotham is one beautiful font, but with that accolade comes the expected flood of Gotham influenced designs. It’s not really a font you can get bored with, but it can be over used. Did you know that GQ magazine were responsible for the initial commission of the Gotham typeface?

It’s not just Gotham or Gotham, there are a number of equally stunning fonts that share a similar initial look and feel, not talking identical here.

This is not a comprehensive list, it is just limited to the few Gotham alternatives that I have in my own personal font library. There are a number of others out there, but these are the ones I use when I might have used Gotham. Also, these are not meant to be ‘exact or very close’ replicas, each font listed has it’s own unique fingerprint, but share some common aesthetics.

Hopefully these examples may entice you to try these out for yourselves.

The Beauty of Sans-Serif Fonts

Sans-serif fonts are seen today in modern design everywhere, much more than in the past years. Some reasons this may have happened is because of the enormous popularity of the font Helvetica as well as the new growing appeal of "minimalist design" or "simplistic appeal". Sans-serif fonts are clean, easily read, sophisticated and modern. I believe that the sans-serif fonts work much better for aesthetic appeal for design purposes, rather than for large blocks of texts.

The Ultimate Wayfinding Typeface

Road signs have been scientifically researched for years, and yet little is known about the parameters for maximum legibility of typefaces used in signage. The earliest signs were often designed by engineers with a strict geometric approach.

Road sign in Poland...

New signage is based on the tradition of print typefaces.

Ralph Hermann believes if you want to improve the legibility of a typeface used for signage, the most important thing to do would be to increase the viewing distance. Hermann created a legibility tool that would allow real-time simulation of different typefaces during the design stage. This would give Ralph the opportunity to experience the typefaces that would be seen from a distance. It would remove the guesswork and allow him to optimize the design even from the worst reading conditions.

Hermann discovered that the small typographic details we concern ourselves with are lost at a distance, and what mattered most was the skeleton of each letter. On one hand the letters should be very generic, something that we would all be able to recognize, on the other hand they need to be unique to stand out because if the letters are too generic they will be harder to differentiate. So in his design he used average proportions as a starting point but also tried to stress the individual character of each letter.

The following is a visual result of how using hermann's type tool assisted in developing a more legible typeface.

The following examples are typical fonts used in signage today (Orange) and the new typeface designed by Ralph Hermann (Blue).

You can see how Ralph has extended and reshaped some of the finer details in each figure in order to be more legible at all ranges.

Think readability, think sans-serif

When designing a website there are a lot of things that must be taken into consideration, an important one being readability. Sure serif fonts can look beautiful, and the flowing marks at the points of each letter allow your eye to flow nicely from one letter to the next, but this only works in high resolution (i.e. print). At low-resolution (i.e. screen) the detailed serifs become more complex and the whitespace tighter, making the readability a lot slower and difficult. 


Solution, a beautiful thing called, sans-serifs. These modern and simple fonts are more legible in low-resolution situations do to their simplicity. The most readable sans-serif fonts are broad and have a generous amount of space between letters, allowing easy recognition of words. A lot of designers find Verdana, to be the most effective font for body copy in web design because of its broad spacing and readability. 


So next time you go to choose that font for your blog post or website; think readability, think sans-serif.

Dear world, please stop using Comic Sans

When one thinks to use a sans-serif font in their design, I really do pray to the design gods that they refrain at all costs from using... Comic Sans. Unfortunately, this font falls under the same category as beautiful fonts such as: Univers, Gotham, and Helvetica. Comic Sans in my opinion is no where close to being a brother or sister of these fonts. It's one of the second removed cousins that really shouldn't even be in the family yet is constantly invited to every family event a dreadfully is commonly the centre of attention... of bad design. Unfortunately, some people in the world have decided that this pre-installed font on their computer would look amazing on their company sign, product announcements, posters, chain e-mails, and even a public letter written by Cleveland Cavaliers' NBA owner, Dan Gilbert.


For some unknown reason he chose to use Comic Sans to address a very public note of seriousness and anger. This font should be left to elementary teachers and you would never guess... comic books! Do me favour... no do EVERYONE a favour, take the extra five minutes to chose a font that will make your design seem classy or that e-mail a little more professional.