Episode 062
🤫 The Secret to Unlocking Your Graphic Design Skills: The Best Fonts ⌨️
September 14th, 2023
24 mins
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In this episode titled we delve into the fascinating world of typography and its crucial role in creating visually appealing graphic designs. Fonts act as the backbone of any design, setting the overall tone and enhancing its impact. In this informative and engaging video, we showcase a compilation of the best fonts available, carefully selected to help you level up your graphic design skills. We discuss how different fonts evoke various emotions, create specific moods, and visually communicate messages to viewers. Our expert hosts will provide valuable insights into choosing the right fonts for different purposes, whether it's for your youth ministry logo, website, or social media graphics.
We share practical tips and tricks to effectively pair fonts, harmonize styles, and create visual hierarchy within your designs. Whether you're a beginner or experienced designer, this video is your guide to unlocking the potential of fonts in graphic design.
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📓SHOWNOTES
//SHOWNOTES & TRANSCRIPTS
http://www.hybridministry.xyz/062
//BEST FONT WEBSITES
http://www.dafont.com
https://www.1001freefonts.com/
//ADOBE TUTORIALS
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLngXlSr64YaKVpQBDSQV6Q9hFeXCptHSu
//ARTICLES REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
*https://www.toptal.com/designers/typography/typeface-classification#:~:text=Typography%20Basics,are%20only%20used%20for%20headlines.
*https://underconstructionpage.com/what-is-a-script-font/
*https://www.typewolf.com/top-10-serif-fonts
*https://looka.com/blog/best-sans-serif-fonts/
*https://underconstructionpage.com/what-is-a-script-font/
*https://books.google.com/books?id=FiJ87ixLs0sC&pg=PA349#v=onepage&q&f=false
*https://looka.com/blog/best-cursive-fonts/
*https://archive.org/details/typographicdeskr0000rose/page/12
*https://threerooms.com/blog/what-is-a-display-font
*https://looka.com/blog/best-cursive-fonts/
TIMECODES
00:00-02:30 The Secret to Unlocking your Graphic Design Skills: Fonts
02:30-05:30 Why Fonts are so Crucial to Eye-Popping Graphic Design
05:30-08:24 What is a Serif Font? What is it used for? And What are the best ones?
08:24-12:07 What are San Serif Fonts? What are they used for? What are the best ones?
12:07-19:29 The Best Font Type to Elevate your Design
19:29-23:56 The 3 Hacks to Level up your 2023 Font-Game
TRANSCRIPT
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Nick Clason (00:00):
In this video, I want to show you the one design element that can take any of your designs to the next level, even if you have no skills whatsoever. The answer to that is fonts. What are fonts? What are popular fonts here in 2023 and how can you utilize them and where can you find them? Hey, everyone, if you and I haven't had a chance to meet yet, my name is Nick. I am a youth pastor in the Dallas-Fort Worth D f W Metroplex area. And the reason that I can say this is because when I started, this was what some of my early designs looked like. I was a youth pastor. I've been a youth pastor now for 12 years, and I had no idea how to do design or graphic design, and I wouldn't even really classify myself now as a graphic designer, but with time and reps and the utilization of fonts, I have gotten I think a lot better than some of these because these are some of the ones now that I've most recently produced and created.
Nick Clason (01:03):
So I would love to invite you to come along for this journey as we explore what different fonts are, the reason why this matters, and how you can utilize them in your church and how you can access them for free in most cases. And if you're wondering, why would this even matter? I want to encourage you to check out this video that I dropped last week, which is saying why every single youth ministry in America in the world frankly, needs a strong digital and social media presence. It's a big deal. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are spending the majority of their times on their phone. So if we as youth pastors and ministers of the gospel want to enter into their space where they are, then we need to know what we're doing. And one key element to that is design. And so in this video, we are going to go ahead and be looking at some different designs.
Nick Clason (01:59):
All the links will be available for you in the description as well as at our website, hybridministry.xyz This episode is slash 0 6 2. It will also have full transcripts. And so even if you have no design skills, I want to encourage you to hang with us to the end of this video because I'm going to give you three hacks to help you level up your design skills, especially with fonts all the way at the end of the video. We're going to go ahead and dive in. So let's get this thing started. Well, hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. We're going to be talking about fonts today, and one of the reasons why is I just got a brand new resident at my job. He's with me and with our team for the next year. And one of the key things that we wanted to level him up on is design, video editing, Photoshop skills, all the things that I spend a lot of time doing.
Nick Clason (02:56):
My boss was hoping to free up some of my time, so I shot some of those tutorials. If you remember the Premier Pro YouTube shorts and Adobe Photoshop tutorials. Shot some of those just a couple of weeks ago and dropped those, and he's been learning through those and some other means. But one of the questions he asked me, he's like, where do you get your fonts? And that's one of the very first just foundational things when it comes to graphic design is you'll realize that what's standard and installed on most computers, whether you have windows or a Mac, is just not going to level it up. So great typography can really elevate any design. Meanwhile, mediocre or mid-level typography is going to tank and submarine a lot of designs and just not going to look as good as it could or as good as maybe it should.
Nick Clason (03:51):
And so one of the very, very key and most basic foundational elements that can really change just about any design is elevating your font game. And you can get so many fonts for free on the internet. We've linked a million of them down in the description or over on the show notes. They'll go and check those out if that's something that you need in our interested in or even just want to explore a little bit more. But at a basic foundational level, let's talk about what even the types of fonts are. So there are five basic fonts, and today we're going to look at three of them, talk about three of them, talk about what is common and what's popular here in 2023. And like I said, I'm going to link to some articles that will then further link you out to even go get some of those fonts.
Nick Clason (04:37):
Some are paid in premium fonts, others are free. And then of course, you can always find knockoffs. A very common font out there is Gotham, which used to be very expensive. And then Google invented a font called Montserrat. That's at least how I say it. You may pronounce it differently. And they're very similar. Montserrat was free and Gotham cost thousands of dollars. And so everyone just went the Montserrat route instead, just as a way to kind of get a Gotham knockoff. So there are, like I said, five basic classifications of fonts or typeface as some people call them. And those five types are Crif fonts, San Crif fonts, script, mono spaced and display. Let's dive in first to what a serif font is. Okay, so what is a serif font? Serif fonts are probably the most common or most classic types of fonts. You have a fair bit of them probably already installed on your computer.
Nick Clason (05:43):
How you can identify a serif font is they have little feet or little decorative stems on the bottom of each of the font type faces. It can be difficult sometimes to read on computer screens, especially if the font is small, but most brands or people are going to be using RIF fonts in order to achieve a more classic or elegant type of feel with their brand. So according to type wolf.com, these are the top 10 most popular or most common RIF fonts that you can use in your design today. The first one is og, and it looks like this. It's just very classic, very thin Sera font. The next one is Times New Roman. Shout out back to high school and writing essays in times New Roman. We all know this one. The third one they would say is Cason. The fourth one is Germond.
Nick Clason (06:41):
I remember my pastor used to use Germond all the time when I was getting started in ministry. That's how I remember it. Freight text looks very similar and classic to some of the other ones that we've talked about so far. GT Super has got a little bit more girth, a little bit more beef to it. We got the Tmm post text. We have Self Modern, which is a little bit more sleek and designy. We got the GT Spectra. And then finally we have editorial news, which in my mind mirrors and rivals a newspaper. So again, just think very classic, think very elegant. If you're watching here on YouTube, you'll notice just how some of these look and they're good, but if that's all you're working with, it can get a little bit boring. And so you may go back to this in a design type of setting.
Nick Clason (07:32):
If you're looking for something that's a little bit more, like I said, classic pulling in a different era, so to speak. And so if you're a youth pastor, you may be doing a series on something of an olden times or newspaper or something like that. RIF fonts are great with that. The other thing is you can pair fonts together. So you may do a RIF and a script or a RIF and a Sand Serif, and so we'll dive into what those other fonts look like. But like I said, you can achieve most of these for free, and you can download all kinds of different ones onto your machine. And so if you're watching on YouTube, you can see these flying in across the screen. If you are watching on YouTube, I'd love to invite you to subscribe, like share a rating. That would be amazing and maybe even consider sharing this with a friend who needs to see it.
Nick Clason (08:21):
Now let's dive into the San Sarah fonts. Okay, so San Serif gets its name right, sand Meaning No, and Crif meaning Crif, so not a Crif font. So basically if a Crif font has the little tails or a little decorative strokes, the sand serif just doesn't. And so honestly, it's pretty easy to identify the difference between the two. San Crif have become a little bit more modern here recently and used in my opinion, quite a bit more frequently. They're used often for simple and clean and really easy to read, especially on computers type of designs. And so the 23 most common fonts according to looka.com, that are used now, that are classic, and many of these, like I said, are free. So link in the description to this article. You can go grab some of them, but we have the Helvetica Now font, which is a great font.
Nick Clason (09:16):
You also have Proxima Nova. And one of the things I like about this one is they have a really heavy weight and you can also go a lot lighter. So the comparison of those two different weights of your font can really pop on a design. You have the FU of Font, public Sands, you also have Jam Grotesque, which has a really good clean, thin version. You have V V D Ss fifties. You have in the 1955 font, you have the Laro Soft, you have Open Sands, which is just a very classic, probably. You have something very similar already installed on one of your computers, a Lare, which has a lot more variation and is a lot more interesting, but it's probably not something you want to type a paper with, right? You got Lanine, you got Code Next, which this one right here looks like something I would love to use.
Nick Clason (10:08):
I love big, thick, heavy, grotesque fonts. Monaco, cia, which has got a clean kind of rounded look to it. Ninja, which has got some tighter, more jagged edges, looks really cool, be good for a video game or something. Inner Sands innovate, which looks like it's got just a lot of different variations. Exia, sbe, Gilmer, sands, Nexa, Canlis, soft and Lato. I used to use Lato all the time. I actually remember there was a game on download youth ministry called Taylor Swift or Lamentations, and they used Lato and I used it all of the time to make a version of it. And then I just started adopting it as one of my primary main design fonts back when I was getting started. So that's how I remember, and that's what I think about with Lato. So Saner fonts are great options. They're very common. It's what most churches are probably using, and you may.
Nick Clason (11:12):
And one of the nice things too about them is they offer, like I'm looking right here at the Lato font, it has regular hairline, thin light, medium, semi bowl, bold, heavy black, italic, hairline, italic, thin, italic layer, italic, medium italic, semi bold, bold, italic, heavy italic, black, italic. So you compare a black italic with just a regular as a two worded design, right? If you were doing overcoming sin, overcoming big, bold, italic, and then sin maybe smaller, maybe hairline, right? Or sin could even be shrunken and center aligned, and you could make that like a RIF font, right? So the pairing of designs is what's really key. But this next one, this next one is really the one in my personal opinion that can take a design from good to great. And so let's dive in and look at what script fonts can do for you.
Nick Clason (12:08):
Alright, so script fonts. You probably know this, it just looks cursive, right? There's two kind of basic kinds of script fonts. There's the classic or elegant looking script font, think wedding invitations. And then there's the casual sort of script font. And this is personally one of my favorite pairings, taking a good serif font, the ones without the tails, like a Lato or a Montserrat, which wasn't even mentioned in the last article, but it was a great font. And pairing that then with a great looking, cool looking script font. And that script font, whether you go casual, can elevate you to a more casual chill level or more elegant can take you to a little bit more classic looking, but saying like a serif with a script font. And then you can use that cursive font or that script font which has strokes and peaks and all kinds of things in its lettering to go over top of an font beneath it or above it, I should say.
Nick Clason (13:06):
And so according to looka.com, again, we're going to look at this article. This is the best script fonts here in 2023, and they're broken up into three different categories. So we're going to be looking at retro cursive, handwriting, cursive, elegant cursive and brush cursive. I meant to say four categories, not three. I'm a youth worker, I'm not good at math, I just help teenagers find Jesus. So let's look at some of these examples. We have the Dakota Motors that looks like you got a little bit of a vintage looking font with motorcycles and cars and stuff like that. We have the broad font, which is just, I really like what that one looks like. It looks a little bit, I dunno, basebally, you got the Minarda font, which reminds me of Save Big Money at Menards, but I really like what that one looks like.
Nick Clason (13:59):
It's looking really cool. You got the Rampage monoline font, that one looks great. It's very similar to that second one that we looked at, the broadly font. And then you got the R font that's got a little bit more retro eighties vibes to it. And then the last one here in the retro cursive font category is the Hope Sands font. And that's just got, it looks a little bit more like standard and then it's got just some extra kind of tails to it. Okay? In the handwritten cursive fonts, one of my favorite, frankly favorite categories is I think it just looks casual. I think it just looks cool and inviting. You got some handwritten cursive fonts. So we got the Joy X Script font. You got the Balta Home font. That one looks like very pen. There's lightness in some of the strokes. It looks like it was written with a pen.
Nick Clason (14:51):
Crystal Spears, you got that font aesthetic notes. I really like what that one looks like too. The TA font's a little thicker, got a little bit more beef to some of its stroke there. The Billy site, that one looks like it was pinned by a grandmother writing something to one of her grandkids. This one looks a little bit more swoopy to me. The youth line font, which looks, I would use that one. I think that one looks cool. And then the Palmer Lake font looks really good, really inviting to me. And then lastly here, we got the with U font. So like I said, all of these links in the description. Also, what you'll find in the description is a link to my completely free ebook, which is going to give you 40 done for you idea social media post ideas. And here's the thing, a lot of social media companies out there, even like Download Youth Mysteries, one of my all time favorite companies, they give you a monthly social media pack.
Nick Clason (15:48):
But the problem is it's all just a bunch of graphics. And if that's what you're going for on social media, great. But if you want a more custom face on camera or just personality with you, your youth ministry, your youth pastor, youth pastors, church staff, I have 40 ideas to help you level up your social media into a completely custom approach to it. So check that out. And what you can do is then you can pair some of these font designs with some of the designs that you'll then put on camera if you want to go down that editing route. Or you can also download my other free ebook, which is how to take a TikTok account from scratch and post things directly on your phone using just the editor on your phone. Very simple, very easy way. But either way, both of these ways help you become more relevant to your students in the other six days of the week when they're not at your church or at your youth ministry.
Nick Clason (16:40):
Let's continue on with fonts. We have the elegant cursive font, and so we have this Righton font. I really like what that one looks like. Jane Tni, that one looks very elegant. Gustav, I would not call these elegant personally. This one may be a little bit diary. Angelique looks a little bit more wedding invitation. The other ones look a little bit more just kind of modern estopa. That one's very monochromatic, very simple, very sleek. Stonington, I like that one. It's got the big long tails. And then we also have here to round it out, we have buttermilk, so beautiful script font there. Lastly, we're going to look at some brush cursive fonts. We have maho, I almost said mahogany, but that's Maho America font, the Chaum font, the Myster tattoo. I really like that one's got just some weird kind of tails on it in the middle weather, top type face, guava yogurt.
Nick Clason (17:43):
And then we have little B. So my point is the script font. You can tell there's a lot more options there. That's because there's so much variation and so much variety to script fonts. I personally think that they just have the ability to really, really change the feel and design of something graphically. So you can be terrible at graphic design. You can have no idea what you're doing. You can download just a basic stock image off of Google Images, unsplash.com, c m G, create any one of those places that you can just get some sort of background type thing, but then you can elevate your design by having some good fonts. All right, A couple of quick, honorable mentions I want to give to you before we dive into those three hacks that can help take you from a beginner to at least someone that looks like they know what they're doing with design is we have the mono spaced font, which is basically a fixed pitch, fixed width, non-proportional font.
Nick Clason (18:42):
It's a font whose letters and characters occupy the same amount of horizontal space. In a lot of cases. You can take a Crif or San Crif font and you can manipulate that, especially in a more powerful tool, say like Photoshop. And then also we have the display font, which is just a really big, broad category that can generally be used and fonts at different large sizes for things like headings. And they're often able to just be seen really well on the things like websites and other things like that. Again, you can make just about any font feel like a display font by changing the size and making it just even bigger. So let's dive in and let's talk about the three hacks to level up your font game in 2023. Alright, leveling up your font game. You may be getting just started completely from scratch, no idea what you're doing.
Nick Clason (19:36):
You may have even made some graphics. You're like, this looks trash. It looks like some of my early on graphics, and that's okay. Everyone has to start somewhere. One of the really, really key things that happens here is repetition. Just keep doing it. What happens in youth ministry a lot of times is you start a job because you love teenagers and you want to invest in them, but then you realize, man, there's an element of other things that I never learned. I didn't go to school for graphic design. I didn't go to school for video editing, but here I am doing those things. I find all of those things important. And so the more you can just level up your font game, all you got to simply do is download these fonts, install them on your computer, and you can start using them in whatever graphics software you have, whether it's PowerPoint, whether it's Photoshop.
Nick Clason (20:20):
You can also just go to canva.com and you can use their pre-installed fonts. The problem is with all these different custom ones here, you're not going to be able to use those on Canva because Canva is the one that's controlling what's being used. But if you're using anything on your computer pages, PowerPoint, Photoshop, any of those products, or even just word, you can include some of these in your thing, and you can pair good font pairings, and that will help you create and establish a feel of vibe and even some authority in your student ministry and in your graphics. But as promised, what are those three hacks to level up your font game? The first one is now that keep an eye for inspiration as you go, as you're walking around, as you're at your kid's school, which is probably not going to be a spot where you're going to find inspiration as you're at football games, as you're at professional football games, as you're at theaters, as you're at plays, as you're out at the supermarket, you'll start to notice fonts and you'll start to notice how they're utilizing them.
Nick Clason (21:27):
I want you to just snap a picture on your cell phone, but look for inspiration as you go, and then pull that back up, and that will help you create and craft a design for something else in the future. Another idea is if you have a series idea, let's say we have a series coming up in Thanksgiving time, and I had my resident try and create a graphic for it. It's called Gratitude Attitude, who doesn't have a Thanksgiving series called Gratitude Attitude? Drop in the comments below what your Thanksgiving series is going to be called. But I was like, Hey, just Google it. Google Gratitude Attitude Church series, and see what you get. And that can be a great source of inspiration to just find and see what some other churches are doing. And then you can steal, borrow, mimic some of the feel, the design elements of it.
Nick Clason (22:15):
And then lastly, I just want to let you know you can, any given time, you don't need to go to looka.com. You don't even need this YouTube video for some of these answers. You can say like, Hey, I want a summer feeling font, Google free summer fonts, or I want a Halloween scary type font, Google free Halloween font. You want a Thanksgiving font free Thanksgiving font. I want a casual font free casual font. You can find just about any type of feel of a font just by simply Googling it or using a tool like deon.com. The only thing you got to be on the outlook for is if you're going to use one of these fonts in a paid moment or a paid version, because some of those are for personal use only, and if you're using them in your church or youth ministry, you're going to be fine because you're not selling any of those things.
Nick Clason (23:04):
If you do choose to turn around and sell it to something like Download Youth Ministry or something like that, you're just going to want to find a font that you can use free for commercial use or purchase one. So, hey, listen, I hope that found this video helpful. Listen, I am on the move to try and get people to utilize digital and social to help influence, disciple and reach the next generation. So we have a complete six part social media framework, setting it up from scratch, step one, step two, step three, step four, and one of the key ones is YouTube. That's that first video. So I hope that you click that, check that out, make sure you like, make sure you rate, make sure you subscribe. And
Nick Clason (23:45):
With a friend, we are here to make digital discipleship easy and possible. Thanks for hanging out, and don't forget to stay hybrid.