Choosing and Pairing Fonts in UI and Web Design

Choosing a typeface may appear to be a trivial step in your UI design process. However, with so many alternatives, narrowing down the appropriate font or deciding on the right font pairing for your projects can be time consuming.

You could also be astonished to discover certain font-related details you were previously unaware of. This font funnel was intended to help you narrow down your options and choose the perfect fonts for your product, audience, and brand, and to make the process of selecting beautiful and practical fonts simple.

Stage 1: Where to get your Fonts

There are many different sites to get fonts depending on pricing and options; these are known as independent font foundries or font libraries.

Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts are two of the most widely used resources. Because the typefaces are open source, optimised for fast loading times, and hosted, Google and Adobe are the de facto choices.

Stage 2: Product Branding and Audience

This section begins with research. It’s critical to grasp the taste and aesthetics of the consumers or customers who will engage with your website or user interfaces if you haven’t already done so in your UX process.

It’s also a good idea to look at the fonts that your competitors use. The first step in aligning product, audience, and brand through font choice is to understand what will resonate with your users as well as the distinctive differentiators you want to highlight in your product.

Stage 3: Font Scalability

Fonts are both useful and artistic.

The most critical factor for optimal utility is readability. Regardless of font size, fonts should be readable.

Pay close attention to the smaller sizes. Consider how it appears on mobile devices versus desktop computers. Look at it in both dark and light modes.

To test this, apply it to a typography scale.

Stage 4: Loading Time

So you’ve discovered the most stunning font that exactly suits your brand’s concept.

Not so fast. While we rarely consider loading time as designers when designing static mockups, the performance cost of the fonts we choose can have a significant influence on both user experience and business goals.

So, why does loading time matter so much?

The Doherty Threshold is a UX rule that states, “In order to keep users’ attention and maximise productivity, provide system feedback within 400ms.”

Web developers must take the fonts we’ve used in our design and implement the font files in our browsers by importing the font file, which increases the load time of our pages dependent on the size of that file.

So finding up a font’s loading time is a critical factor to consider before purchasing it.

Another technique to speed up font loading on your website is to just download the font weights you require. Because each extra font weight contributes to the overall size of your design, limit yourself to roughly 3-4 primary hierarchies.

If you suspect that the typefaces you’ve chosen are causing slow loading times, let your developer know so that they may make the required adjustments.

Stage 5: Font Attributes

Font Format: Another thing to keep in mind is that not all font formats are supported by all browsers. To ensure that it is a web-safe font. If a font is TTF, OTF, SVG, or WOFF, it is web safe, meaning it will display correctly in all major browsers.

Font Style – Based on your user research, you’ll want to match the personality of your typeface to the personality of your brand.

By studying the letterforms more closely, you can typically acquire a sense of a font’s personality. Is it serif (for a more serious look) or thick sans serif (for a more technical look) and handwritten for a more organic human touch? Sans Serif vs. Serif

Font Family – Choose a typeface from a large font family (to have more size and style options to play with and less different font families to deal with) Here’s another video explaining the differences between typefaces, font families, and typography.

Font combining – 

If you must combine more than one font family, it’s critical to know what works well together and what doesn’t.

While this is a personal preference, certain combinations are simply more discordant than others.

Instead of combining typefaces that are excessively similar but only slightly different, use something that has a balanced contrast between the letterforms. Of course, you don’t want to use fonts that aren’t related.

Stage 6: Font Roles

Assign different functions to typefaces or typographic treatments like all capitals, h1s, h2s, body, subtitles, and so on.

This can be substantially aided by creating a style tile, UI kit, or Design System. Here’s how you take inspiration from some of the best design systems.

Stage 7: Font Fallback

So you’ve finally arrived at the perfect font choice after a long distillation, but there’s one more minor detail… Toss everything out. That’s correct. Have you ever noticed that the code includes a list of fonts that aren’t the ones you used in your designs? That’s because, no matter how intelligent they are, browsers still require a backup plan.

That means that if your font doesn’t render properly for some reason, the browser will fall back to the user’s system font. So, as a final check, ensure that your type looks good in one of the defaults and inform your developer of your backup option.

You’ll be able to more consciously narrow down your font selections using this stages, arriving at the ideal solutions for your UI or web designs like magic.