There's a reason why we're not all graphic designers – "nice fonts" can be subjective, however, there are a lot of basics that we all can – and should – know. For any designer, setting type is a common and very important task. While honouring the text we're setting, we need to also determine its legibility and readability. In doing so, we provide the text with a range of qualities encouraging and empowering a reader to either skim quickly to a specific snippet of information or comfortably digest larger sections of the text.

While there aren't any hard rules for selecting fonts, here are a few guidelines that may help you on your way.

1.   Follow the rule of 3

The only quantitative rule for design is the “Rule of 3”. When you start tweaking the fonts of your document, be sure to apply no more than three typefaces per design (or page). That’s not to say that you can’t use multiple styles within a font family (i.e. Helvetica Bold for headlines and Helvetica Light for photo credits), just be mindful of not mixing too many typefaces and styles – fight the temptation to blend Impact, Courier and Trebuchet in the same document. While there might be a few exceptions to this rule, it’s a good sanity check, to ensure that you don’t go overboard and over-complicate your design. And as a good rule of thumb, you should probably just avoid Papyrus and Comic Sans. Always. Just take our word for it.

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