What Steve Jobs can teach us about fonts

If you never heard the speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University back in 2005, I recommend that you head over to Youtube now and listen to it, it is highly inspiring. There is one particular element of the speech that I want to refer to, which is the story Steve tells about calligraphy. Having dropped off college, he attended a few creative classes and got really interested in the beauty of calligraphy. What didn't seem as an important skill to gain at the time, resulted in a revolutionary way to approach text on computers. He said later: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

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What lessons should you learn from Steve?

Today there are thousands of fonts of all types available and it would be foolish not to pay attention to them. Fonts can instantly change the look and feel of any piece of communication, be it printed or digital. They can instantly transmit a feeling of elegance, grunge, modern, retro, futuristic, comic, you name it... Fonts are just as important as color, composition or photography and should not be left ignored. Too many small businesses keep working with the Arial, Times New Roman or Calibri fonts installed by default, without realizing the opportunity they miss to instantly make their material looking professional with the use of better fonts.

Which fonts should you choose?

The first thing is to choose whether you want to buy a font or use a free, more limited version. I would recommend that you choose and buy a family of fonts that will become part of your corporate identity. A family will include variations of the font, like bold, condensed, italic, etc.. The font should be distributed to all your staff, and used in all official communications, from Word documents to printed brochures. Examples of corporate fonts include Myriad Pro, Interstate, Neue Helvetica or Trade Gothic. These fonts are tidy and well constructed, and fit well for most communication materials.

Then you can consider using free fonts to spice up some of your communications, like flyers or powerpoint presentations. Fat, funky or hand crafted fonts can have a great impact when used wisely in conjunction with more traditional fonts. But please stop using the default fancy, overused, unprofessional fonts on your computer like Curlz.

Here is a list of 5 free but beautiful fonts you can download and start using right now:

Lobster Two


Bebas Neue


Museo


Chunk Five


Sketch Block

Where can you find beautiful fonts ?

If you search on google you will find lots of websites where you can buy fonts or download free fonts, but here are a few of my favorites:

Paid fonts:

• Fonts


• My fonts


• Linotype


• FontShop

Free fonts:

• Dafont


• Font Squirrel

I really encourage you to build a small library of fonts and start using them, so get browsing now and choose your favorites. Which ones will you choose? Let me know in the comments.