Font Personality: How to Choose Your Best

Wondering about font personality type?

Curious about the psychology of fonts?

A font can convey mood, attitude, and tone with a personality perceived from the font’s features.

Just as in color psychology, there’s a psychology of typography that affects your potential customers’ perception of your business.

So you want to get it right!

With 10 infographics and a fun video, we’ll cover:

• Serif, sans serif, modern, script, and more font types.
• The psychology of fonts.
• What fonts say about your business.
• Ugly fonts you never should use!
• Fonts personified in Star Wars characters.
• Bonus! How to identify a specific font name.

So much fun to be had, so let’s get started!

Here’s a little teaser of an infographic from UrbanFonts.com that’ll help you see the difference between serif and sans serif fonts. The full infographic has more examples, and you’ll find it at the end of this article (it’s super long!).

An Introduction to Font Psychology infographic

On this infographic from Kinkead Designs, you’ll see many popular typefaces and learn their font category and personality!

The Psychology of Fonts infographic

Here’s another clear depiction of 5 different font categories and what qualities they project to your audience.

This infographic from weemss.com will also show you the 5 most popular fonts in each category.

The Psychology Behind Type Choices infographic

This lovely infographic will show you the feelings, emotions, and associations evoked by the 5 font categories – and spelled out in the fonts themselves!

Designer and source unknown.

Fonts and Feelings: Psychology in Typography infographic

RCM Websites provides this infographic that clarifies some key terminology in typography, such as leading, kerning, and tracking.

You’ll not only learn how the top 6 categories of fonts are perceived, but also get a look at 5 big-brand logos, and what they say about their respective companies.

Font Moods Infographic

Learn the feelings elicited by 15 different types of fonts in this wonderfully colorful infographic from DesignMantic.

In this one, you’ll get to take a look at more categories of fonts, including:

• Italic fonts
• Ultra Thin fonts
• Black fonts
• Grunge fonts
• Vintage fonts

Plus 10 more!

Type Guide: What Fonts Say About Your Business

While everything we’ve covered above indirectly shows what fonts say, this clever infographic shows what they’d say if they could actually speak!

From Crazy Egg.

Fonts Personified as Star Wars Characters

Would more visualization help?

Here are two!

A Galactic Guide to Typography Infographic

This clever infographic teams up top font personalities with favorite Star Wars characters!

I’m sorry to say that the brilliant Geek Twins who created it no longer have their website.

Type Classification Personification infographic

This one from the mind of Adam Ladd transforms type styles into little people icons!

Ugly Fonts: How to Know the Fonts to Never Use

Ugly fonts: they’re not cool, like ugly sweaters.

No. Ugly fonts are to be avoided. They’re the fonts to never use.

But how do you know which fonts they are? Could you be using one, or more, right now?

Let me clue you in. Then, enjoy a funny fonts video, too!

I compiled the most-mentioned ugly fonts on this graphic for you to pin and share.

Of course, ugly is in the eye of the beholder, and every font could have a proper usage.

You’ll probably want to avoid using these fonts for your branding, though. Most of them are overused system fonts that will cheapen your image.

Here’s that funny video I thought you’d enjoy!

“Be careful about which fonts you use, because the wrong ones make you look like a proper wally.”

Please take this with a grain of salt!

I can tell you that fonts like Arial are often found on both most-hated and most-loved fonts of different designers.

No love lost for the others. though 😉

What Ugly Fonts Say About You infographic

Courtesy of Cracked.com comes this infographic that lets us know what these overused fonts communicate about the business that dares to use them!

So, what do you think: are you using any of these so-called ugly fonts? Do you agree that these are fonts to never use? Share your opinion in the comments!

How to Identify a Font Easily

Ever look at type and wonder, What font is it?

Perhaps you’ve saved some Pinterest Pins that you find inspiring.

One of the fonts really speaks to you, and it’d be perfect for your branding.

But how are you supposed to figure out what font it is? You’re not a designer!

(News flash: Even designers can’t name all fonts on sight. Luc Devroye, “The Mathematician Typographer,” says he’s catalogued over half a million fonts. I doubt I could name 1% of them).

But no worries! You won’t have to scroll through 500,000 fonts to figure out the name of the one you like. There’s an easier way to identify fonts!

Note: This is a sponsored post. I was asked to write an honest review in exchange for compensation. And honest is what you’ll get!

How to Identify Fonts with whatfontis.com

Your first step is to get the clearest depiction of the font possible.

If you’re on a Mac, you can grab a screenshot of just the type portion of a Pin, web page, etc., by pressing Command-Shift-4 at the same time. The pointer changes to a crosshair (see above).

• Move the crosshair to where you want to start the screenshot, then drag to select an area.
• When you’ve selected the type area you want, release your mouse or trackpad button (the more different characters included, the better).
• Find the screenshot as a .png file on your desktop.

If you don’t have a Mac or a screen-capture tool like Jing, just take a screenshot of your full PC desktop or phone, or download an image like a Pin.* We’ll edit it in the next step.

*For font identification only! Don’t use others’ Pinterest Pins.

Now, upload your font sample at WhatFontIs.com.

Be sure to tick the box if the background is darker than the font. And, if you need to crop your screen shot down to just the pertinent portion, click the gear at right and choose “Activate the image editor.”

When you’re ready, click “Continue.”

Cropping is fast and easy, and the editor even inverted the colors so I had dark type on a light background, in this example.

Click “Crop image” or “Crop image and reverse colors” to continue.

Now you’re going to tell WhatFontIs what the letters in the image are, so it can identify similar fonts. It will only use 10 letters on a free account, so identify letters that vary a lot among fonts, like g, a, t, Q or f.

Make sure letters match the images (uppercase to uppercase etc.).

One oddity I noticed with this task is that (on all 3 fonts I tested) WhatFontIs saw the i and its dot as 2 separate elements. But that’s usually not a very critical letter.

When you’re ready, click “Continue.”

You can also choose for search results to include all fonts, only free fonts, or only commercial-use fonts, which is handy.

One thing I didn’t like at all is that there are lots of ads on the site, which I removed from the screen shots. Of course, everyone deserves compensation for their hard work, so I understand the reasoning. I do it too! It doesn’t prevent you from getting the results you need, but if you’ll be using this more than once in a while, you might consider upgrading to a paid account to get rid of them.

I did find acceptable font suggestions in both the free and commercial returns.

However, all free fonts are labeled “personal use.” If you want a free font, I suggest you check the download source for licensing restrictions. There are some Google fonts in the free results that are perfectly acceptable for commercial use.

Free to use. All fonts are released under open source licenses. You can use them in any non-commercial or commercial project.

OK, I guess we can’t expect a free service to check all the separate licenses! I sure wouldn’t want to. Even if you paid me 😉

I thought the third one in the “free” results was a great match: Noto Serif Bold. And this one does happen to be a Google font, so a great find!

Can WhatFontIs Identify Script Fonts?

Let’s get a little trickier. Maybe even mean – because I already know what this font is, and I want to see if WhatFontIs can find it.

My initial results were not good. Now, you have options to “Go to previous step and change chars or post your image to the forum.” I decided to persist instead.

I found that WFI had problems identifying characters when they were connected. The only individual letters WFI could “see” were q and u. Hardly enough to go on.

So I reverted to their image editor, which in this case opened pixlr.com.

I painted a little yellow line between each character, saved, and checked the new sample in WFI.

The results were WAY better! The first two would have been completely acceptable – had I not already known that this was a FREE Google font.

The actual font was down at #29 in the free font selections.

Now, this was a tough challenge. And, you’re not expected to use it to identify a font you already know. That’s not the point of it 😉

In both tests so far, I got totally acceptable, close matches to the font sample I uploaded.

It just might take a little more work with a script font. Try my trick of separating the letters.

Or, just upload to the forum and let someone else help you!

Font Finder Final Challenge

I tried one last font – a sans serif.

I was happy with the top “free font” return!

One issue with this font, though, is the circular dots on the i’s. That’s actually fairly unusual, so if that feature is important to you, WhatFontIs can’t help you find it. It doesn’t see a lower case i as one letter but as two separate elements.

However, you have some good leads to follow up on. The download sites will probably show you a full alphabet, and you can take it from there.

This font was from Pinterest’s branding, so those circular dots could even be custom.

Whatfontis.com Font Identifier: The Verdict

Unless you’re working with million-dollar advertising accounts, WhatFontIs.com will be very useful for you to find a close match for that font you love.

A very handy feature for my budget-minded readers is that you can choose to only search free fonts.

The burden is on you to ensure that the font license allows the use you need. However, this is true in any case! Even when you pay for photos, design services, etc., you need to read the terms.

Be sure to pin this post so you can reference it later.

I trust this in-depth WhatFontIs.com review will help you identify your favorite font!

Conclusion: Choosing Fonts Based on Personality

We covered a lot! Did you miss anything?

• Serif, sans serif, modern, script, and more font types.
• The psychology of fonts.
• What fonts say about your business.
• Ugly fonts you never should use!
• Fonts personified in Star Wars characters.
• How to identify a specific font by name.

I hope you learned all you needed to choose the best fonts for your next project.

Below is the final infographic as promised: Serif vs. Sans Serif from Urban Fonts.

Share with a friend if this post helped you understand the psychology of fonts and font personality.