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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