Colors and Typography: A comprehensive guide

Content creators are racing to find the most attractive way to style their work in the information age. It is not enough to simply present helpful information, but you must also make it seem as appealing as possible.

There is nothing new under the Sun, given that the old emphasis on calligraphy was replaced with typography. We will analyze the importance of typography in your business or academic essay writing.

As for colors, the field of color theory is becoming increasingly relevant. A web designer cannot afford to be ignorant of basic notions of color theory.

 
Nobody really knows how it works, but it seems that certain colors stimulate certain emotions in humans. While our individual affinity for a particular color is somewhat subjective, some general rules and patterns are more or less universal.

 

Branding and identity

It may seem counter-intuitive, but a business must develop an identity as if it were a person. It has to incorporate a specific look, color, style, and hold to that style. Many famous brands are burned into our memories, and we associate specific colors and typography with those brands.

Standing out and having your own look is even more relevant in the age of the Internet. Depending on your business specialization, the competition is often global. Companies from across the world are fighting for the same client base, and you must make sure to stand out and have an identifiable look.

Most people are designed to make snap judgments in a matter of seconds. Given the range of options and the lowering attention spans caused by the digital stream of information, your content must impress at a glance. Your social media, main page, landing pages, logos must all be aesthetically pleasing.

While it can be hard to grasp at first, it is comforting to know that you can influence your customer’s mood and disposition with color implementation. The visibility of your typography and the smoothness of the reading experience are also affected.

 
Overall, marketing is very color-dependent. Business owners must learn about main colors, complementary colors, psychology, and more.

 
The ultimate goal is to gain recognition. With the most famous brands, you only need to glance at their logos with the corner of your eye, and the association is immediately formed.

 
The mood-setting effects of specific fonts are also well-documented and essential. In addition, good style choice will reduce eye strain and make it easier for clients to speed-read your web page.

 

Basic terminology

This article aims to educate people from all backgrounds with varying levels of experience in color theory or typography. It is important to understand the terminology before any other progress can be made.

Typography - Typography is both an art and a craft. It attempts to use line-spacing, letter display, letter size, and letter spacing to organize unique writing styles. Good typography is essential for advertising or formatting essays.

Typeface - A common misconception occurs regularly, as “typeface” and “font” are considered to be synonyms and represent the same thing. That is a false association.

Typeface describes a group of characters that implements a similar design, such as Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, and Calibri.

Font - A font is a sub-category of the typeface, representing a distinct style. As an example, Arial bold and Georgia bold are both fonts. Fonts represent some unique height, width, and point dimensions.

Weight - Weight represents the thickness of each specific character and symbol. Usually, they can be regular, thin, bold, or black.

Kerning - The separation between two characters defines itself by the term: “kerning.” Wider horizontal separation usually makes it easier for your eyes to skim the writing, unlike tightly packed letter variations.

Point - point represents the overall “tallness” of the font. It is measured vertically, from top to bottom. The focus is to measure the entire font and not just an individual character.

Leading - Leading represents the distance between different type lines. More sizable spacing favors easy reading and line differentiation.

Serif - Serif represents the short lines included in certain letters. To understand the concept, you need to picture a capital ‘A’ written in cursive. The extra lines are designed to mimic a pen stroke flow, giving the writing a more classic, handwritten look.

Meanwhile, Sans Serif represents the opposite notions. No small lines or tails are included in the typography, giving a more machine-written aspect to the font. Finally, we have Slab Serif, which is generally thicker and more blocky when compared to Sans Serif or Serif.

Script typeface - while Serif only gives a vague reminder of actual handwriting, Script Typeface is much more similar. Some variations can mimic a classy look while still maintaining machine-style accuracy in spacing, thickness, and size.

Blackletter - Speaking of classic looks, we have Blackletter. It is designed to look like writing from the Middle and Dark ages. Known as Gothic Script, Gothic minuscule, and Old English, it invokes an aura of age-old respectability. The most famous example of this style is the New York Times logo, one of the world’s most prominent newspapers.

 

Colors and their use

After enumerating the most important typography terms, it is time to do the same for colors and color theory. In essence, light acts like a wave in certain situations. These waves have a determined length, similar to ripples on water.

Colors are labels that our brains give to specific wavelengths of light. Although we do not know the cause, certain colors and combinations can cause particular emotions in humans.

Some color-emotion correlations are more straightforward to explain than others. For example, red is often used for warnings, corrections, or error messages. This relationship makes sense because red is the color of blood, fire, and many poisonous creatures. It is associated with feelings of energic discharge, trauma and generally attracts immediate attention.

 
It makes sense to use it in warnings, traffic lights, or to highlight errors.

Green, on the other hand, is the color of spring, life, and nature. It has a very calming and soothing effect on humans.

The Color Wheel

“Color Wheel” is a very descriptive name, as it describes 12 primary hues arranged in a wheel. These colors are split into two main categories: warm colors and cold colors.

Orange, red, and yellow are seen as warmer colors. To be fair, hot things tend to glow in those colors.
Meanwhile, blue and green colors are regularly found in “cold” things such as ice, water, grass, and the sky.

Hue - As previously mentioned, colors are just labels that our brains give to light waves’ lengths. Waves are not always exact and can vary widely. So what’s a Hue, and how does it differ from a color?

To put it simply: if Hues represent the city, the color is the street and house address. Hues only described the larger, generalized color family. Meanwhile, colors can refer to tone, tint, hue, or shade. For example, the term “Blue” is a hue. Azure, Sky Blue, Magenta, Ultramarine, and Ice Blue are specific colors from that family.

The term “color” is too broad and vague for use in a technical manner. Here are the parameters used to define each specific chromatic choice:

Value - Value is used to describe and measure the relative darkness (shade) or lightness (tint) of a color.

Chroma - Chroma represents the intensity of color and how vibrant it is.

Using shade, tint, and tone, you can play around with the colors in order to find the ideal version for your website banner or logo. Or, you can research lists of the most popular colors and copy their color codes.

 

Fonts in business and content promotion

Expert web designers, developers, and online content marketers will never ignore the power of fonts. They can influence the overall feel of the content, in addition to the emotions of potential customers.
You can manipulate fonts to make your ads seems classy, professional, friendly, casual, trustworthy, urgent, and so on.

We previously gave the example of the New York Times logo and how it is written in an Old English-style font. That font works for a newspaper, but it wouldn’t work for a tech company such as Apple or Twitter. “Old” and “respectable” are not feelings that tech companies are trying to stir. They are trying to look dynamic, hip, innovative, and forward-looking.

 

The header consideration

A common mistake is to base your font on the aesthetics of your header. That can be a mistake because most fonts are altered when used in a title. The increased size and scale of a header can compensate for the failings of a font.

 
As you switch to regular writing for the text’s intro and body, the letters will shrink. This size reduction can cause the text to be strenuous on the eyes, especially if you aim to produce long-form content.

Be careful to define your headers, body, intros, and so on. A recurring mistake is to omit using header tags. Some writers just alter the font of the particular line. It will look like a header, but it will be tagged as a standard text line.

Readers won’t be able to tell the difference because the enlarged font will physically look like a header. However, the Google algorithm won’t be able to identify the Titles and H1 without a tag.

Headers are essential for people to find your content online. Even the prettiest website will be buried on the 5th page of search engine results if it is not optimized for search engines.

Two main lessons can be drawn from these facts:

1. Font aspects can be altered by scaling them up or down. Thus, it is best to check the size of the font in both standard and header formats.
2. It is ok to use different fonts for your main header and your content. Granted, if different fonts are used, they have to go well together. Make sure they match.

 

Typeface choice

Choosing the perfect typeface is the most time-consuming part of the process for a majority of content creators. You will have access to many choices, making it difficult to settle on a single option.

Yet, the list can be narrowed a bit if you prioritize your choices based on emotion. What do your want the reader or viewer to feel?

Are you trying to cultivate an aura of serious refinement or a casual and friendly tone that makes people feel comfortable?

Every business owner must be aware of his/her target audience. While most cannot afford to pay for focus groups and data analytics, even a vague direction is better than nothing. Whimsical tones will discredit even the best-researched papers, while an austere and official ad will make even high-end tech applications seem archaic.

Should I play it safe?

The tech industry is not as uniform and monopolar as it may seem. Many features, widgets, and add-ons are not backward or cross-platform compatible. For example, it used to be the case that IM apps were the dominant form of communication before social media. These apps supported a basic package of fonts and emojis.

 
Anything more than this basic package requires a separate installation of an emoji pack.

Fonts on websites have a similar status, with the exception that the basic pack is relatively large. Currently, there are over one thousand free Google fonts available. As long as you choose one of these fonts, almost everyone will be able to see them.

However, custom fonts are another story. If the viewer or reader does not have the same font pack installed, he/she may not be able to read your work.
Still, being restricted to Google fonts is not as bad as it sounds. Even if you use a different font every single day, it will take years until you would have to repeat yourself.

Conclusion

At its core, art is about altering or stimulating emotion. Humans have always used aesthetics to sell products, argument ideas, courtship, and so much more.
The ultimate conclusion is that typography and color selection matter. It will have a tangible effect on your bottom line or your grade average.

Professionals cannot afford to neglect this powerful effect.