You sit down at a fancy new restaurant. While trying to impress your date by pronouncing the French entrées, the waiter hands you a wine menu. You stare and it, but you’re suddenly too afraid to ask a question lest your ignorance be laid bare for all to see. For some, opening the font menu in a design application invokes a similar deer-in-the-headlights response. But it doesn’t have to. With a little knowledge, you can demystify the process of choosing an appropriate font. The following checklist will point you in the right direction: 1. Can you read it? More importantly, can your audience read it? If at all possible, print a draft of your design in its final size and evaluated it at the distance it will be viewed. What appears great on your computer screen may be completely unreadable when printed. Look over print samples from your printer to get an idea of text visibility on specific materials. Text on a glossy finish tends to pick up a lot of glare, and text printed over a busy background can be difficult to distinguish. And don’t forget to take age into consideration — older customers generally have a harder time with fine print. 2. Does it distract? In the design world, graphics are often the pop stars and words are the backup dancers. A good font should compliment the design, not steal the show. And this goes not only for the font itself, but for alignment and spacing issues as well. Ensure that text has suitable breathing room when close to other design elements. Nothing says “amateur” more than text that has been shoved up against something else. And we all know what happens when one thing is too close to another (think your two kids in the backseat). 3. Is it consistent? As a general rule, use no more than three different fonts or font styles (bold, italics, etc.) in a single design. Using too many fonts pulls apart the final product, and a viewer will label it “ugly” and “confusing” without necessarily knowing what’s wrong with it. What’s more, the child of inconsistency is unprofessionalism. Remember that business card your cousin once showed you after getting his “startup” off the ground? The one he “designed himself”? Look at it again and you’ll likely notice that a centralized theme was nowhere to be found — lost in a cacophony of competing fonts and elements.