Smartfont choices can mean the difference between someone resonating with, liking, and sharing your message or continuing to scroll through their feed. And as with complementary colors, certain fonts pair well together and can help enhance your message, solidify a brand, and establish hierarchy. In other words, typography and how fonts work together form important design principles. Whether you are trying to create a logo, invitation, flyer, resume, advertisement, or something else, font pairing is a necessary factor to consider. Because of the sheer volume of fonts available, choosing the best font pairs can be overwhelming.
Adobe Express includes 20,000 licensed fonts, was well as curated font recommendations for your use in your next project. The recommendations suggest which standalone font you should use, but also include suggestions for complementary fonts, font colors, and font effects to help you create unique designs. These typography recommendations are curated from free fonts in Adobe Express templates, which are created by professional designers.
While Adobe Express helps you pick font pairings directly in the app, this blog post explores font combinations by content type. Finding fonts that go together can be difficult, but this post will make the process for your next design easy by recommending project-specific font pairs and teaching you about the moods or messages that certain font pairings inspire.
As you can see in the social media ads above, your eye is first drawn to the big, bold, and unique fonts in the headings before you look at the supplementary information. This font pairing creates an eye-appealing contrast that helps your social media ads to stand out. Some examples of unique and stylish typefaces to use for a header include Bungee, Usurp, Embryo, Hobeaux Rococeaux, Lora, and Gurkner. Pair your funkier header fonts with some more simple and crisp ones, such as Forma, Elza, Open Sans, Articulat CF, Lato, or Roboto.
Some bold font recommendations include Monarcha, Mundial, Greycliff, Oswald, Archivo Black, and Elza. Pair these bold fonts with modern ones such as Ofelia, Avant Garde Gothic, Kallisto, Bebas Neue, Source Sans Pro, or Forma DJR Display. Although they are separated out into bold and modern, many of these typefaces represent font families, meaning they have both bold and modern font variations. Feel free to explore the font families and mix them around to create font combinations that suit you and your business the best.
Sometimes less is more when it comes to logos, and the same often goes for font choices. Some contemporary font combos that keep it crisp and clean include Century Gothic, Montserrat, Darkmode Off, PT Sans, Dazzle Unicase, Hypatia Sans, Usual, Ingeborg, Lato, Poppins, and Scotch Display. Pair any of these fonts with each other to create modern, clean, and sophisticated font combinations for your logo.
When designing a resume, it is important to utilize different fonts to help potential employers quicky digest vital information about the candidate with the option to read further if necessary. However, it is crucial to consider legibility as well. A great font pairing for resumes is heavy headers with clean text. Heavy fonts are those that carry more weight and appear thicker and bolder; they are useful for highlighting vital information. Pairing heavy headers with clean text creates an eye-appealing contrast that helps the most important information stand out while increasing readability and allowing the descriptive text to be clear and crisp.
Heavy headers and clean text are complementary fonts that look both professional and interesting. Some font recommendations to use for bold headers include, Odile, Depot New, Bilo, Garamond Premier, and Bely. For a clean body text, look no further than Auto, Forma DJR Text, Acumin, Open Sans, Source Sans, or Cronos. Most of the font families listed here include font types that can be used for a bold header or a clean body text, so feel free to explore and mix them around to create a resume that will help you to stand out from the crowd.
Pairing two elegant fonts elevates your invitation by creating a sense of refinement and class that conveys quality and timelessness. Elegant fonts are pleasing to the eye and keep your audience engaged. Elegant fonts do not necessarily have to be cursive or script fonts (although they can); fonts like sans serif variations can also convey crisp and simple elegance. When pairing elegant fonts, consider pairing a complex font with a clean font.
There are many different types of elegant fonts, so we have divided our recommendations into three groups: cursive, handwritten, and general. Some great cursive typefaces include Allyson, Dalliance, Alfresco, Sloop Script, and any font from the Bluemlein Script Collection. For cute handwritten fonts, check out Adore You or La Bohemienne. Pair a cursive or handwritten font with a more standard elegant typeface such as Krul, Romana, Guyot Press, Cormorant Garamond, Source Sans Pro, or Chapman. Consider making one of the fonts you choose italic to really bring out the elegance.
When you market high-end services or products, it is vital that your company exudes a sense of luxury. Pairing two luxury fonts can evoke a feeling of high fashion elegance but be careful not to go too far and create something that looks tacky. When pairing luxury fonts, we recommend either pairing a more overstated font with an understated one, or meeting in the middle and pairing two more moderate yet still tasteful fonts.
Be careful not to overstate the product. Luxury is a subtle concept that deserves a light touch, which is why a classic serif is always a good option. Some elegant font recommendations that you can pair with each other include Condor, Rhythm, Didoni URW, Contralto, Gastromond, Dashiel Fine, Map Roman, Quiverleaf CF, Abril Fatface, Merriweather, and Playfair Display. Consider making any of these fonts italic and see how it changes the look. Choose any two of these fonts and pair them together to create a sense of high-class refinement.
Events call for chunky fonts, geometric designs, and lots of bright colors. Some great retro typefaces to consider using for your next font mix include BD Retrocentric, Gin, Blakley, Acier, Tomarik Display, and anything from The Tipoteca Series. Mix these nostalgic fonts with more modern, polished fonts, such as Greycliff CF, Serenity, Gibson, Quasimoda, Futura, Josefin Sans, or Arvo.
Creating the right font pairing on business cards can often be tricky. Some of our recommendations for clean and classic fonts are Monarcha, EB Garamond, Gimlet Display, Montserrat, Karmina Sans, Chaparral, Trade Gothic Next, Forma DJR Text, Basic Sans, Quicksand, Josefin Sans, and Apparat. Explore these fonts and play around with them when creating your business card.
Geometric fonts are comprised of rounded letters and simple shapes, but when bolded and used as a header they help specific information to stand out. Geometric headers pair well with friendly fonts (aka basic fonts that are easy to read) because this font pairing creates a welcoming and approachable feeling. Some geometric typefaces that are great for headers include Noka, Dazzle Unicase, Urbane, JAF Domus Titling, Bodoni URW, Alegreya, and Gibson. When searching for friendly fonts, we recommend Gimlet, Embury, Calibri, Obliqua Sans, Chaparral, or Montserrat.
Font pairing is a vital, sometimes daunting task when creating any new piece of media. The font combinations you choose say a lot about you, your brand, your event -- you name it. Font pairings are a necessary and yet often overlooked aspect to consider when attempting to efficiently communicate a message to your audience. Use this blog post as a guide for font combinations and as an inspiration to push yourself and your brand to the highest possible level.
Want to create your own standout flyer, advertisement, logo, business card, or something else? Start for free with Adobe Express and pick from thousands of templates to easily design your next project.
When it comes to combining different typefaces, there are a few ways to go about it. You can opt for bold contrasts, such as a heavy slab serif font and a delicate cursive script; or pair similar fonts to give your design projects a more dynamic look, whilst building a cohesive brand image. Or even, pair two different weights or styles from the same font family for a more minimalist and elegant effect.
Lobster is one of the most popular script fonts, thanks to its quirky and playful look and high legibility. It would make a very good logo font and paired with the nice rounded letterforms of a sans serif font like Cabin, it would make a stunning combination for an aesthetic portfolio website or YouTube channel art.
This font pair is probably the textbook definition of contrast done well: using a crisp, yet chunky font for the header and a slim and elegant typeface for the main copy. The stark difference between the two typefaces really delivers a punch, so a combination like this would be great on all sorts of flyers and brochures, helping people immediately notice that text, but thanks to high legibility also take in information quickly.
These two fonts look very much alike, but Didact Gothic has a slightly longer x-height, while Arimo is a bit more balanced. These slight differences allow the crisp sans serifs a more humanistic feel, making them a great choice as a web font for modern SaaS companies.
Pairing two fonts from the same family can sometimes look a bit bland. However, these dynamic variations look equally sophisticated and cool, so if you want a clean and polished look for your designs definitely consider one of them!
Merriweather is a serif font with an unusually crisp look (the strokes at the end of the letters are geometric and well balanced). This combo would be wonderful for print designs, anything from book covers to business cards!
Nope, this is not a typo. Some fonts have a really interesting and distinct look that looks best paired with itself. Space Mono is a monospace font designed by Colophon Foundry for Google Design. Thanks to its grotesque style it bears a heavy resemblance to headings from the 1960s. For that reason, this cool and edgy font is a perfect pick for all retro designs.
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