Understanding The Critical Role Of Typography In Sign Design

The font is an incredibly important part of sign design. You want your font to be eye-catching, easy to read, scalable, and aligned with your brand. That’s a lot to ask—and that’s why you’ll commonly see the same few fonts repeated across all kinds of signage. Once you know what these fonts are (as you soon will), you’ll see them everywhere.

In this article, we’re going to help you select the perfect font for your business—fonts that meet all of the demands we laid out above. In the process, we’ll help you find the right font for your next sign. Let’s dive right in: 

The Fundamentals Of Font Selection For Effective Signage

Readability Vs. Aesthetic Appeal

This isn’t really a versus, per se—you don’t want to sacrifice readability for aesthetic appeal, but you don’t want your font to look boring, either. We want a font that’s harmonious—eye-catching, visually appealing, and readable.

With that said, readability is more important than aesthetic appeal unless you’re going for a guerilla or edgy marketing campaign where illegibility is supposed to spark curiosity (we’ve seen stranger marketing moves). That’s why you’ll rarely see cursive fonts or highly stylized fonts on billboards or signage; the harder a sign is to read, the more likely it is that people will pass it by without absorbing its message. 

Key Characteristics Of Sign-Friendly Fonts

We’ve already talked about readability, which is the most important characteristic of a sign-friendly font. Sans-serif fonts tend to be best for readability at a large scale—more on that later. Here are a couple of other characteristics you should be on the lookout for:

Kerning: Kerning is the spacing between letters—there’s an old joke that bad kerning is keming because an r and an n squished together looks like an m. 

The Impact font is an example of a font with tight kerning; the space is a bit too close, so letters can bleed together, making it hard to read.  

Courier New, on the other hand, is a monospaced font—every letter has an equal space. This can make some letters feel a little too spread out, especially at the sizes that would be legible on a sign.

Consistency: You want your font to be consistent across your sign. What we just did—switching through three fonts in three paragraphs—is a perfect example of what not to do when designing a sign—but actually using the fonts we’re talking about is the best way to demonstrate these principles. 

You can utilize multiple fonts on the same sign; the fonts just have to have complementary styles. That takes a pretty keen eye, so while you’re learning, it’s usually best to stick with one font and its variants, like Arial Standard and Arial Bold. 

Font Families Best-Suited For Different Sign Types

Serif Fonts: When And How To Use Them

Serif fonts are fonts that feature serifs, little tails that appear at the end of a letter stroke. They’re less legible at a distance than sans-serif fonts, but they can be a great choice for signs that you read at medium distance.

Times New Roman may be the most famous example of a serif font; it’s a great choice for newspapers and was invented for a British newspaper (The Times) in 1931.

While serif fonts aren’t the first choice when it comes to signage, they do have their place. You can use serif fonts for banners and other mid-range advertising, especially if you’re trying to convey a classic, upscale, or artisan vibe. 

Sans-Serif Fonts: Modern Clarity And Impact

Sans-serif fonts are what most of us use and see every day; the font you’re reading right now is a sans-serif. They’re the perfect fonts for high-speed or long-distance viewing; think roadside billboards. 

You’ll also see sans-serif fonts all over the internet and digital signage; their clean, sleek look conveys a modern, tech-savvy aesthetic. Google’s logo, for example, is based on a sans-serif font creatively known as “Product Sans” (the font itself was created by Google). Sans-serif makes up a huge percentage of the different fonts you’ll see for digital content. 

Want to go big or go modern? Use a sans-serif font; that should be your go-to for most signage. 

Display Fonts: Making A Bold Statement

Display fonts, also known as display typefaces, are designed specifically to be used for titles and headings at large sizes; the purpose of a display font is to be eye-catching and readable all at once. 

Bebas neUE is a great example of a display font. You might be thinking to yourself, “It doesn’t look very good here, and why are you yelling at me?”— sorry about that. Trust us—it looks great on a sign, and while it might seem like yelling when it’s just a word or two, it’s attention-grabbing, and reads a lot less like someone shouting at you.

That was intense—sorry. You can see how bold and eye-catching the font is; it’s perfect for some signs, but not for every sign. As always, you’ll have to keep your branding at the front of your mind when choosing a font (or any element for your sign, for that matter). 

Technical Considerations In Sign Font Design

Size And Scaling Challenges

You just saw a perfect example of a size and scaling challenge in sign font design—BEBAS NEUE looks pretty great as a sign title, but just feels jarring in the context of this article. You could say that it doesn’t scale down well—the bold, all-caps lettering feels uncomfortable in this context.

Other fonts don’t scale up well—usually because they have exaggerated features, decorative flourishes, or dense details that read as tacky or cluttered when scaled up. Fonts may also have poor proportions when scaled up—think the even spacing of Courier New.

Scripted fonts like Pacifico are a perfect example of fonts that don’t scale up well. Here, the rounded design feels playful and easy enough to read, but at scale, it would feel out of place—too playful, and too hard to read. 

Ideally, you want your fonts to be consistent across all of your branding, with the exception of special events—and even then, you want fonts to play well with your logo. To achieve this, it’s important to choose fonts that scale well, both up and down—that way, you can use the same selection of fonts whether you’re making a post on your Instagram or designing a sign for your storefront. 

Viewing Distance And Font Legibility

There’s a rule of thumb you can follow for fonts and viewing distance: You should have at least one inch / 2.54 cm of letter height for every 10 feet / 305 cm of intended viewing distance. This means that if you expect someone to be 100 feet / 30 m away, your text needs to be at least 10 inches / 25.4 cm tall—and your display text (like titles and headings) should be even bigger. 

The further away you expect someone to be when they read your sign, the simpler your font needs to be. Opt for clean, bold font to maximize legibility; use fonts with uniform, thick font weights (how bold the strokes of the font appear).

Arial Bold is a great example of a font that looks great on signs; it’s the font we’ve been using this whole time, but bold.

Of course, you might not want to use Arial Bold, because it looks a little generic; you might opt for Futura Bold, Helvetica Bold, or another bold sans-serif font choice to use for your display text. These are some of the best fonts at a larger font size; play around with them, and see which font works best for your brand! 

On the note of display text, your display font should be at least 2 to 3 times bigger than your regular font. This means that if your regular font is 10 inches / 25.4 cm tall, your display font may need to be 20 to 30 inches / 50.8 to 76.2 cm tall; that can take up a lot of real estate!

Finally, keep in mind that the further you are away (and the faster you’re going), the harder it’s going to be to read text. This is why billboards should have as few words as possible, but posters and sandwich signs can be more detailed. 

Differences In Fonts

Serif Vs. Sans-Serif

We’ve talked at length about serif and sans-serif fonts at this point, but you might be asking yourself “Why do sans-serif fonts look so much better than serif fonts? What’s the point of those serifs, anyway?”

The answer isn’t obvious. Most people find serif fonts to be easier to read in print, and serifs certainly play an important role in identifying letters. Consider the capital letter “I” and the lowercase letter “l”; without serifs, it’s impossible to tell them apart. In your signage (especially your display font), where there are very few words, this shouldn’t be a problem. In body text on paper, however, serifs can improve readability. 

Expert Design Support At Your Local SpeedPro Canada Studio

Professional Typography Design Services

We’ve just covered a whole lot of information, and we hope you’ve found it helpful—but we understand if you’re not going to memorize it all. Don’t worry; when you work with SpeedPro to design a sign, we’ll help you choose the right font for you. We’ll work with you to ensure the font meets your marketing goals and aligns with your overall brand; we can even give you a few examples of the fonts we’re thinking of before we print your sign. 

Bringing Your Brand Vision To Life

The font you choose is, of course, only one part of typography; you’ll also need to consider how big the font is, how it contrasts with the rest of your sign, and how it fits into your overall branding. The rules of thumb are pretty straightforward; use dark-coloured fonts on a light background, and light-coloured fonts on a dark background. Black on white, white on black—simple stuff! 

Remember—you want to select a few fonts to use across all of your branding. Not sure which fonts go together? SpeedPro Canada has in-house design skills for projecting your brand. 

Mastering Typography: The Key To Exceptional Sign Design

The goal of this article was to give you the fundamentals of typography and font, and how they relate to signage. At the top, we mentioned that your font must be eye-catching, easy to read, scalable, and aligned with your brand. These traits are what make your sign a compelling call-to-action. The rules we’ve outlined here will help you find a font that meets all of these criteria—and if you need any assistance, you can always count on your local SpeedPro.