Come on everyone! Put your hands together for Comic Sans MS! Shake what your mama gave you if you love a little Monotype Corsiva with a side of Wingdings!
Playing with fonts is fun. Okay, maybe not quite as fun as what you did this Memorial Day weekend, but a tad above moderately satisfying. We’ve certainly come a long way from the Apple II+ days when you were lucky if you got to use lowercase letters.
Of course, even though you are now free to present your audience with marketing materials written in anything from a blood-dripping font to something that resembles calligraphy, you might want to think twice before you make that important choice.
What Your Font Choice Can Do
It turns out that font plays a key role in how people perceive the difficulty of a given task. In this sweet article by Roger Dooley, he explains that people are more likely to do something if they think it’s easy, and that people tend to think things are easier if they are explained in a very readable font. The article references a study performed by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz that clearly backs up this idea. What this means for you is if you want somebody to do something (like buy your product or visit your store), you’ll be better off if you ask them in a basic, curlicue-free font.
From where we sit, we think Dooley’s article and Song and Schwarz’s study are right on. While crazy, fancy, and fun fonts appeal to us, we realize that they can slow down the process of conveying information and sometimes give off the wrong vibe. Aesthetic appeal is important, but at the end of the day, your message is the most vital part of your marketing materials. And if you can get your message across quickly and make your audience think your request is something very doable, you’ve done what you set out to do with your brochure.
We Still Love You, Lucida Handwriting and Vivaldi
Now, don’t take this the wrong way. Fancy pants fonts and wacky fonts have their benefits, too. Sometimes they’ll work well for a heading or a title. And they have other applications that we’ll talk about next time.
Until then, feel free to express yourself by fingerpainting, playing Michael Bolton songs on your accordion, or choreographing modern dance routines for your pets to perform, but avoid showing the zany or artistic sides of your personality through the fonts you choose for your marketing copy.
