How To Use Digital Design Typography – The Right Way

A Comprehensive How-To in Digital Design

We have all heard of Digital Marketing.

Either from a marketing meeting or from a casual kopitiam talk with a friend who runs their own business.

Maybe a better question is: What about Digital Design?

This digital design guide will show you what’s what.

Every day, our attention is directly or indirectly connected to digital tools and information. The core of the message being conveyed usually revolved around one of the key ingredient – Typography!

Typography is a skill that every designer needs to master in the digital era. As with any design project, creative briefs are merely a place to get started.

Here are 5 practical digital design typography recommendations and tips that you can use in your creative projects:

01. Three Is A Crowd

Using more than three typefaces simultaneously can make your app/website look busy and cluttered. It’s better to limit the number of used font families to a minimum (two is plenty, one is often sufficient) and stick to the same ones through the entire website/app.

For beginners, it’s recommended to stay with one font until you have achieved mastery of that font. Play with the styles.

Based on Oliver Reichenstein’s Web Design Is 95% Typography. Typography plays a significant role in this process: Good typography makes the act of reading effortless, while poor typography turns users off.

02. One Family, Different Styles

Play with the styles. Modern typefaces already come with many different styles, which means they share common distinct weights. Typefaces with a larger range of styles can help you differentiate text in special contexts, like a Call-To-Action(CTA) button or a label. A good example is Roboto Font rom Google.

03. Choose The Right Typeface

With the growing popularity of typography design, the choices of typefaces from which to choose gets a lot more evolving each year. Users will access your website from devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. This is why it is important to have a mobile responsive website.

It’s essential to ensure that the typeface you choose is legible on smaller screens! Try to avoid fonts that use cursive script, such as Pacifico (in the example above): although they are beautiful for short headlines, they are difficult to read especially in the body text.

04. Use Fonts With Clear Letters

Legibility is a measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from another in a specific typeface. But, not all of typefaces are made with legibility as a primary design purpose.

Many typefaces confuse similar letterforms, especially with “I”s and “L”s (as seen in the picture above). Another frequent legibility issue is inferior letter spacing –  put together, an “r” and “n” can easily turn into an “m”. You will need to avoid such fonts because people will have problems reading them on small screens.

05. Avoid Capitalising All Letters

All caps text –  significance text with all the letters capitalised – is fine in contexts which don’t involve reading (such as acronyms or trademarks), but it is far better to prevent all caps once your message involves conveying your studies.

Simply said, do not use all caps in text blocks longer than 1 line of text.

Bonus Content

I’ve also prepared a list of resources that will help you improve your typography skills:

• Google Fonts and Typekit will help you discover typefaces for your next web or mobile app project.
• Fontpair.co will provide you an excellent way to pair your fonts – the right way.
• Inspiration Grid is a great source of typography inspiration.

Conclusion

Typography is a skill that every designer should master in the digital design era.

The first bit of advice would be to practice. You will really learn something by doing it. The more you try text styles on, the better idea you’ll get of how it looks and functions for your users.

Take this practical guide as a starting point on your road for crafting typography for your display layout.

Need a creative design work to be done? Click here and we will be in touch shortly.

How Email Design Services Can Help You Boost Sales Conversion

What’s an EDM? EDM or widely known as Electronic Direct Marketing, Email Direct Marketing or even Electronic Direct Mail – depending on how your business coin the term internally. Mоѕt еmаilѕ аrе ореnеd within the firѕt hоur оf their arrival. Effective email design services can hаvе tremendous impact and influence оn your conversions if uѕеd properly. Here are three quick tips to get you started!

01. Choose your email marketing platform

It is vitally important to choose an online email marketing solution to manage subscribers, send emails, and track results which offers integrations with other programs. Although there are vast and plenty, we’ve personally tested Aweber and MailChimp. We preferred the latter as it’s the easiest to use – this is OUR personal choice. Both solutions offered really simple campaign and list management, template designing a breeze, and handle all the technicalities of sending lots of emails without getting blacklisted for spamming.

Did you know that we provide custom email design services? Check us out and you won’t be disappointed.

02. Know your audience

Email marketing is all about reaching people. If you want to connect effectively with your readers, you have to communicate with them on their level. That’s why it’s a great idea to find out what their interests are.

Amazingly, Google Analytics can ease your pain.

Step 1: Click on “Audience” on the left-hand sidebar of GA.

Step 2: Select “Interests” from the dropdown menu that appears below.

Step 3: Click on “Overview.”

Always think about how you would talk to your recipients based on the Interests. Email newsletters should be friendly and casual and don’t forget to be you!

03. Your header banner

Catchy header banners communicate a lot in a small space and short time. And then followed by the main message body of most emails is plain ol’ text (as it should be). But this first image they see communicates a lot before they even start reading. Here’s what we did for Trifactor email design.

Whether you’re going for a corporate feel to fit strict branding guideline or something more creative, make sure your email newsletter doesn’t come across as merely an advertising tool for unrelated services to your readers. For example, if you’re in a weight lifting industry, it’s ok to send them supplement reviews and NOT how to get rich making money online schemes. So many brands try to squeeze every link from their site into the newsletter making it messy. Remember, keep your reader’s focus as tight and easy to their eyes as possible.

Hope you love our quick -fire tips to avoid simple mistakes often done by the beginners – and sometimes experienced businesses.

How Infographic Design Can Help Your Business?

Let’s face it – more businesses are adopting infographic design. We are now moving towards a fast-paced age where information, data and knowledge takes too much time to decipher. This is why the introduction of information graphics or infographics are used to present information quickly and clearly.

Infographic marketing in 2016 is still the most effective way to generate awareness online. Sure, plenty of people have abused it with poor layout structure.

Now let’s take a look at the trend:

Based on Google Trends, it has been on the rise since 2013 and business owners should take advantage of infographic marketing to gain brand credibility which will definitely boost sales.

Here’s an example of an infographic design we did for a relocation company in Singapore.

Did you know?

Infographics are everywhere! Infographics is one of the most effective marketing tool in the form of an easy to follow data-turned-visual explanation. Our brains do less work to digest visual content, first of all. And, more compellingly for marketers, visual content drives more traffic and engagement than plain text does.

Ok i’m SOLD!

Before we get down to business, we are more than happy to discuss with you on your infographic project.

At one point in our life, we’ve thought about becoming a graphic designer but have a hard time drawing a simple stick man without breaking a few pencils. So we try to explore Adobe Photoshop or even the web based Canva to live a graphic designer’s dream. The result: Not so legible headline and body text and disjointed layout. So we came up with a sweet looking graphic design infographics to ease your creative journey.

Use our basic Graphic Design Infographics tips in 5 minutes to be a better designer!

Like the design? Need one design for your yourself or business?

We know how time consuming it is to research and design an infographic. Let us do the research and design for you.