Weddingbee Blog

Now this is a story, all about fonts…cause our invites need a’written a’right about now…OK, I’m obviously not very good at parodying Fresh Prince, but it’s been a long week and I need a little singing here. You could always humour me and sing along, you know?

Creative content via Hoefler & Frere-Jones / Collage via Lord of Design

Fontsssss. What a choice. They mean so. much. to. designers.

Really, I cannot stress how much the font expresses before you’ve even read any of the words on the invite. The font already gives you the look and feel, a taste of what you should expect at the wedding, a hint of what the bride and groom are like…

There’s no way I was going to pick a scripty, curly, unreadable, fluttery font for our invites because that would not represent Mr. Funnel Cake and me. I think I would die of shame if any of my design friends received an invite for our wedding with something Zapfino or Brush Script. How embarrassing!

I just had a flashback of my mother writing the RSVP cards for my sister’s wedding and doing them in Comic Sans. COMIC SANS. Really?? I think I just shuddered a little because I can’t remember if I got her to change the font to something more acceptable or not.

Image via App Scout

OK, I admit it. I am a font snob. There. I said it!

But as a graphic designer, it’s extremely important for me to be proud of the invitations we send out. I want people to be impressed, or at least not horrified, and Mr. FC and I want to look back on our invitations in 10 or 20 years and still be happy with the way we designed them.

So when it came to choosing a font, I had a lot of choices in front of me. I was pretty sure that I wanted something sans serif, simple, classic, and bold. Our choices:

Helvetica:

Helvetica was the absolute first font I thought of because it is innately Swiss and I thought it would be such a wonderful, subtle way to bring Mr. Funnel Cake’s Swiss heritage into the invites, which we are planning to do in a Swiss graphic-design style of sorts.

Akzidenz Grotesk:

Some people, such as my Swiss graphic-design mentor Ruedi Rüegg, think that Helvetica is just too boring. If I recall, he used Akzidenz when designing the signage for the Zürich airport. I thought I would try it out and see if it would give me the bold Swiss look I was aiming for.

Verlag:

Verlag is a wonderful Hoefler & Frere Jones font used in Germany’s public-transportation system. I love how modern and prominent it looks. I used this font in my senior thesis project, so it was a top choice. Really, I loooove this font.

Didot:

I thought I would contemplate Didot, also by Hoefler & Frere Jones, but ultimately I nixed the serif early on so I didn’t even bother doing a trial design with it. It’s a great font, but it just wouldn’t work for our invitation style.

Whitney:

This one’s nother Hoefler & Frere Jones font. (Can you tell what my favourite type foundry is??) Whitney is also elegant and stylish. Slight downfall of the H&FJ fonts are that they don’t have special characters.

Knockout:

Knockout is a fun H&FJ font that my friend used in her senior thesis…so I thought about playing the invitations up because Knockout has a tooon of different weights.

After I decided which fonts to test, I started some trial runs of how I plan on laying out our text blocks. I reviewed the five test runs (duplicated for caps, Vs, sentence case), and then I showed them to Mr. Funnel Cake for his opinion.

Top to bottom: Helvetica, Verlag, Whitney, Akzidenz, Knockout

I didn’t let Mr. FC know which font he was looking at, but naturally the Swiss in him leaned toward Helvetica, which made me extremely happy. So Helvetica it IS!

How did you choose the font for your invites?

**Graphics made by me unless noted**