IntuitiveDesigns

How important are fonts in web design? I would say they are essential and taking care of them will change the result of a web design 100%. When Naomi and I designed the latest version of Intuitive Designs, we decided to put extra care in the fonts we would use and give them the importance they deserve.

Apart from how important it is to work with the text, paragraphs and line height, I think choosing the right font for a web design is as important as picking the wedding dress for a bride. No matter how wonderful your design is, it can be spoiled very easily if you don’t use a font that fits well and helps to express the concept of the web site.

For the latest design of this web site, we knew that we wanted a retro feeling from the 50’s, it is the sort of the style that we decided to go for in the overall design. One of the reasons why we decided tom use this style is because we probably got influenced from looking a lot at old publicity and magazine advertisements from other periods. We’re always amazed about how great designers these people were. Here you can see some of the ads that inspired for our web design in terms of using a nice font. The illustration and design work is excellent in all of them, but the fonts in particular really stand out. Don’t you think they are really charming and irresistible?

These people worked the font as one of the most important elements in design and we truly think they almost did a way of art of it. Because of the importance given to the fonts during the period from 20’s to 60’s, a large quantity of fonts were designed. Most of them were really artistic. At the time, it was a requirement for a designer to be able to create good fonts. Today this skill is pretty much lost in the general profession, but on the other hand we can count with numerous wonderful designers specialized in font design.

So after having tried numerous fonts, we decided to use one from Borges Lettering & Design called “Bounce Script”. We absolutely love the fonts of this designer and this one in particularly fit our tag line like a glove! It made the sentence look beautiful, it brought harmony to the rest of the design, and it added the right uplifting feeling that we were looking for. I have to say that we made a couple of customizations on the font: we changed the exclamation point according with style line of the icons on the site, and we also warped a little the text to make it more vibrant and energetic. It is amazing how much these little details can do in design.

On a different level, I recently designed a customized font of my own from my own handwriting just for my personal use at my own web site KoldoBarroso.com. I am not a professional font designer, but I thought it could be interesting to have my own signature in my web site to make it as much personal as possible. I wrote a blog post in my web site about the process of using my own customized font, but the new design featuring the font is still under development and it won’t be on line until a couple of weeks from now.

The whole process of doing my personal font was really long and it meant quite a lot of work, but I think it’s really worthwhile since my calligraphy will always be the same and now I will be able to use it in my computer for the rest of my life. After all, we think if more artists and designers would put more care in the fonts the Internet would be a more exciting and personal place to be. We can hope!