Understanding Fonts

Trying to find the right font? Before you choose Arial, Times New Roman, or even Papryus (please don’t) let’s explore the world of fonts and typography. It is a place of creativity, accessibility, and will have your campaign feeling very harmonious. Let’s dive in.

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Fonts & Typography

Fonts are a system of designed letters & characters, enabling you to express language with creativity & clarity. The system will include a base font with an extension of different weights (eg. bold), styles (eg. italic), and sizing (eg. condensed). Think of a common font – Arial – it was created in 1982 by two gentlemen for IBM, and later adopted by Microsoft. It has a range of weights and styles, and also an interesting back story (check out fonts.com). Fonts are fascinating!
Typography on the other hand, is the art of using type and fonts to enable readability, accessibility, and creativity. Understanding type hierarchy, space, and complements are all key elements within this art. You may be surprised, but it is often this art that separates the real designers from the rest.     


Finding the right font

Before you go ahead and pick your favourite, refer to your brand style guide if you have one, as you’ll find the font selections for you. Otherwise, here are some helpful tips in choosing the right font:
  • Accessibility comes before creativity. Before finding the curliest or grungiest font you can, consider your audience, and fonts that are clear and easily read.
  • Find complementary serif & san-serif fonts. Serif fonts have stylised ends (eg. Lora whilst san-serif fonts have clean straight edges. Using serif font for your Headings and san-serif for paragraph and sub-headings can have a great effect.
  • Start with Google Fonts (free) or Adobe fonts (paid subscription). For most use cases, you’ll find the perfect fit.
  • Create a test page, rather than testing one word. Have a HEADING, sub-Heading, and paragraph/body text and play with fonts. Seeing the font in a use-case is much more helpful than just looking at single words.
  • If in doubt, start with something simple like Lato (Google Font) or Neue Haas Grotesk (Adobe Font). These are quite generic fonts but are clean and offer a lot of flexibility. You are better off spending days working on your campaign than searching for the perfect font.  


Understanding hierarchy

Once you have your font ready, planning your hierarchy is the next step. Find a nice magazine or cookbook near you and open up a page. If you look carefully, you see there is a hierarchy in the font design. You’ll have a:

Primary Heading

Secondary Heading

SUB-HEADING

Large paragraph text

Paragraph/Body text

Small paragraph text

These are all designed to help the viewers eyes focus on what is important and what is expected. Typically, the flow moves from larger (Primary Heading) to smaller (paragraph text). Notice that the bigger the text is the less that can be said, whilst the smaller it is the more can be said. Here you can make decisions on what your viewers take in. 
In web design, your hierarchy is expressed in Headings & Paragraph styles. Typically, most websites will have 3-4 Heading styles (H1, 2, 3, 4) and 2-3 paragraph styles (p, small-p, large-p). Take a look at your favourite website and using just your eye or tools like Font Finder, see how the hierarchy has been developed. 


Setting Up Your Fonts

Setting up your fonts in Raisely is simple, thanks to our integrations with Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit. Follow the steps below:

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# Using Google Fonts

1
Within your campaign, on the sidebar select Design > Fonts
2
Select Heading 1 first to reveal font settings
3
Enter the first few characters of your font to reveal in selection, and Select your font
4
Adjust the size of your font, and any other height or width settings you require
5
Adjust the font weight, either selecting or unselecting Bold (B) or select the down arrow to reveal other weights if available. In web design, font weights may be represented by numbers (eg. 400 is normal, 700 is bold, 900 is heavy).
6
If you wish to set the heading style as capitalised, simply select the Transform ( Tt)button.
7
Colours can be selected now to set defaults, or individual through the page builder.
8
Select Save Changes before closing, otherwise font will revert to defaults.
9
Repeat this process for all the Heading and Paragraph styles you require.
10
Links carry the same settings as your Paragraph style, though they contain 3 styles relating to their action – regular, hover, active (clicked). To give your links some style, adjust the colour and styles of each.

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# Using Adobe Fonts

Adobe fonts are easily integrated with Raisely, simply using Adobe Fonts web projects feature. Once you have added your Adobe Fonts into your web project (in Adobe), the project will have a Project ID. Once you've copied this ID, to setup the integration in Raisely, simply:
1
From the campaign sidebar, select Settings > Apps & Integrations
2
Use the switcher to toggle Adobe Fonts to On. Paste in the Adobe Web Project ID, and select Save
3
Open the  Design > Fonts settings from your campaign sidebar. For each font style you will need to enter the exact name of your font family into the field (e.g. houschka-pro instead of Houschka Pro Bold). To find this, open the fonts setting in Adobe Fonts.    
4
If you have used various font weights, you will need to inject some CSS to specify which font-weight is used. Simply add:
 h1 {font-weight:100/200/300/400/500/600/700/900;}
	

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# Advanced: Using Custom Fonts

Uploading custom fonts requires editing your CSS stylesheet. Follow these steps to setup:
1
From your campaign sidebar, select Design > Media Library
2
Upload your font files here, and copy URL for each file, pasting them into a blank table document you can refer to in the next steps. Include the file format in the table, as you will need this (eg. oft, woff, woff2, etc)
3
In Design, open up Custom Styles and then your stylesheet. Scroll down to the very bottom, where we can place custom code.
4
For each font you uploaded, you will need to enter the following lines:

@font-face {
font-family: "FONT FAMILY";
src: url(FONT URL from Media Library) format("FILETYPE");
font-weight:normal/bold/300/700/900;
}
	

For example, if I was using Riya as a font the code would be:

@font-face {
font-family: "Riya"; 
src: url(https://raisely-images.imgix.net/campaign/uploads/raya.otf) format("opentype");
font-weight:normal;
}
	
You can find the font family name from where you purchased the font.    
Font FILETYPES include: "woff", "woff2", "truetype", "opentype". Enter relevant file type from the files extension.
To enter multiple fonts, you can separate each on a new line followed by ,
@font-face {
font-family: "Riya";
src:url(https://yourURLhere.otf ) format("opentype"),
src:url(https://yourURLhere.woff ) format("woff"),
src:url(https://yourURLhere.woff) format("woff2"),
src:url(https://yourURLhere.ttf ) format("truetype");
}
	
4
Save Changes.
Your font family will now be available to you within your Design > Fonts settings. Like adding Adobe Fonts, you will need to enter the exact name of your font family into the field (including any hyphens and capitalisations) The name of the font family can also be found where you purchased your font from. If you have used various font weights, you will need to inject some CSS to specify which font-weight is used. Simply add:
 h1 {
 font-weight:100/200/300/400/500/600/700/900;}

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Accessibility

There is no one kind of viewer to your site. Therefore, when it comes to accessibility there can be two guiding principles that enable accessibility. Firstly, understand the standards when it comes to font size, colour, and space. Material.io has partnered with Google to provide a helpful tool to understanding font scale. Check it out! A good idea is also to view your site through a browser window in a common resolution. This allows you to make sure your fonts are working for your viewers and not just you. You can use a tool like whatsismyviewport to set the resolution to 1366 x 768, a helpful size to base design upon.
Secondly, edit your content. Keeping your content minimal and to the point enables those experiencing your campaign an undistracting experience. This in turn can serve those with learning and reading difficulties. 

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