AV News 201- August 2015
We can, and I think should, apply this principle, albeit in microcosm, to our activities in audio visual sequencing. Sometimes the message is subtler- we wish to evoke just a maritime feel, or a busy metropolitan ambience- a peaceful garden, or a junk-ridden slum... Finding the right type face can be an interesting and worthwhile exercise.
By the way, ' font ' strictly speaking signifies a particular size and character of letterface within a family of types- ' italic ', or ' bold ' for example.
Your computer is probably already endowed with a fair number of choices, explore these certainly, but don ' t be content with Arial, or the over-tired and overworked Comic Sans! There are thousands out there on the web. Some you may be asked to pay large sums for- the Monotype Corporation have some fine letterfaces for instance, but there is no need to pay anything at all, there are lots of amateur type designers out there, and some of their work is excellent.( And some is just plain awful- be discriminating!)
Google ' free fonts ' and you will see a new world open up before you. Downloading is easy, and installing should also not be a problem. Once they are in the ' Fonts ' folder of your system( right click on the newly downloaded file once it is out of its ' zip ' container and select ' install ' from the dropdown) they will become available in PhotoShop, in your word processor, in PicturesToExe- in fact in pretty much all the software you might use. One small word of warning- only very rarely, but you just might come across a malicious font file- I have one on my computer that I have managed to disable but still cannot delete- so run your anti-virus checker on any download before you attempt to install it!
Often the fonts you find will be very expressive- just right to evoke the mood and feel of your sequence, but if they are quite extreme in their styling they may need to be used sparingly. I am all for creating unity in a typographical scheme by using only fonts from the same family of type, everything set in Gill Sans in all its many manifestations for example- but you would hardly set a whole book nowadays in ' Old English ' for instance, it would be extremely trying to read. These more exotic faces are often referred to as ' display ' faces- suitable for just a main title perhaps, while everything else- credits, captions etcetera- are in something more restrained.
Colour is another important consideration. Seen on a screen, light coloured lettering against a dark background is much easier on the eye than the other way around- a very pale background tends to dazzle. The received wisdom is that red is an unsuitable colour for type matter. The fact is that we need to consider tone value as much as colour- red out of black( i. e. red lettering on a black ground) is perfectly readable( and possibly quite dramatic) but superimposed on a deep blue sky red may not be so good, the two colours are too similar in their relatively dark tones. But don ' t just play safe with plain white lettering- often a slight tint can be more interesting. A tint of the same colour as the background works well sometimes- for example pale yellow on deep gold, or light green out of dark green.
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