Selecting Fonts for Visiting Cards

Selecting fonts for the visiting card is an important task as it reflects the mood of the card. This also mostly depends on the occupation of the owner of the card.

Font Types
Fonts types is a design of the character. You will get number of different styles that can be utilized for cards and other printed matter. We will discuss about the technical aspect of the font in brief. Fonts are divided into two basic categories.

1. Serif

2. Sans Serif

Serif fonts has small lines at the end of the characters as shown in the above figure in the green circle. And sans serif doesn't have those lines as shown in the red circle.

Technically it is said that sans serif fonts are difficult to read hence used for small text components like headlines or captions. Serifs are easily readable hence used for the main matter or the body text.

Examples of Serif Fonts

Times
Times New Roman
Courier, Courier New

Examples of Serif Fonts

Arial
Verdana
Tahoma

What and How to select?
As stated in the article before, the choice of font depends upon the type of the card. If it is very formal card like the card of lawyer, doctor etc. you can use formal type of fonts say Times New Roman. But there is no fix rule as such. The point is, selection of the font should reflect the mood of the card. The font used on the actors card may not be the same used for the doctors card. You can not us fancy font for the lawyers card.

If you select script font, you must understand that you may not be able to use it for address, as the address may have the smallest font size in the visiting card as compared to other matter. You may use it for the name with bigger font size and loose track, i.e. more space between the characters because script fonts are difficult to read when they are tight to gather.

You can use narrow type of font if the address contains lot of matter so that it can be accommodated in 2-3 or few lines.

Bold, Italics, spacing, tracks, leading, width, everything must be considered while working with fonts. But these aspects mostly comes after you select the basic font. This main selection of the font plays important role as it reflects the nature of the card.