Typography

Member lesson

Pairing typefaces

Lesson 14 of 34 in Typography.

Pairing Fonts – 3 effective ways to combine typefaces, from easy to advanced · Pimp my Type
Lesson

Using more than one typeface in one system, on purpose. Google's Fonts Knowledge has a page on pairing typefaces fonts.google.com, and the shelf of advice on the subject is long, most of it circular.

display · one voicetext · the otherpair on differencetwo faces that nearly match read as a mistake
Two typefaces paired by contrast of weight and width rather than similarity.
Two figures, one in two almost matching blues with a cross and one in a dark jacket over a pale shirt with a tick, each above a matching pair of text blocks.
Two nearly matching blues look like a mistake, while a dark jacket over a pale shirt looks chosen. Typeface pairs work the same way: clear contrast or one shared family.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A serif and a sans built by the same designer on the same skeleton, so they already agree.”

    • Lineal
    • Superfamily
    • Didone
    • Vox-ATypI
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “Difference in how the letters are constructed rather than in how they are decorated.”

    • Hinting
    • Structural contrast
    • Rasterisation
    • Registered axis
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A cut of a typeface drawn for a particular size, with spacing and contrast adjusted to suit it.”

    • Hot metal
    • Punchcutter
    • Incunabula
    • Optical size

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