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Best Font Pick of the Month: the Museo Family
Wednesday, March 3, 2013by The BWD Team in Design
Here’s our second installment of a new monthly feature in which the BWD team picks out a favorite font for the month. Check out last week’s pick: Cubano.
Adore Your Place is one of the many websites where we’ve used the beautiful font, Museo Sans.
It’s no secret that BWD loves the Museo family of fonts by artist Jos Buivenga of Arnhem. We’ve use one of the family’s flagship options–Museo Sans–for tons of our projects including Valenches Music Company and School, our own website, NordiDock Concrete Floating Dock Systems, and many others. Museo offers up a perfect taste of class with a modern twist. Its letters’ shapes carry great weight while also remaining delicate and fresh, providing a fantastic modern look over the tired sans serif font options found on so many websites today. It shines equally bright in both headings and blocks of body text.
Even better yet, Museo is one of the fantastic font families offered up by Typekit, one of the leading and first companies to provide beautiful, innovative, and unique fonts in great web formats alongside strict accessibility and usability standards. We use Typekit for almost every single one of our projects, and the results always yield final websites that look fantastic.
There’s Museo regular and Museo Slab as well, both fully mature font options depending on your style. Personally, we’re suckers for slab style fonts, so you’ll find us using this sharp guy wherever we can. We’re also very glad that Buivenga moved on to create it:
When Museo became a succes I researched some possibilities of other versions. First I couldn’t find the right solutions to all Museo Slab’s design hurdles, but about one year later —after a radio interview with Aaron and Matt from RBtL —my interest in Museo Slab got fired up again. Don’t know why, but this time I got it all working.
What do you think? Does this font tickle your design fancy as much as it does ours? Could you see this font making a name–quite literally–for your small business?
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Tagged with: design, font pick of the month, fonts, Museo, Museo Sans, Sans-serif, Typekit3 Comments
The Fascinating Process of Logo Design for Small Businesses: Town & Cooking
Monday, February 2, 2013by The BWD Team in Design
We’ve had the absolute pleasure of working with home chef Alex Mosko the past few weeks to create all of the strategy and production materials for his latest web project, “Town & Cooking.” Town & Cooking will feature an amazing digital setting for beginner and advanced home cooks alike to get comfortable with cooking by better understanding the basics such as “how to brown butter,” and “what type of eggs should I choose?” in the form of amazingly simple tip-cards attached to posts and recipes, in addition to a massive recipe database using our latest exclusive plugin for clients to take advantage of Google’s rich snippet data for recipes.
While there are a ton of awesome parts to this project–including the use of the revolutionary content e-commerce platform, Tinypass–we wanted to share with our readers what it’s like to first develop some initial direction for a logo, pick through the options, and then come out with a final winner.
Setting “the mood”
Since developing the perfect logo for a small business can be a definitely personal affair for an owner or other stakeholders, the BWD team takes the time to fully explore what the business means to them, the type of tone they’d like to set, and what tickles their visual fancy. To do this, we often set a collaborative mood board with a client, as seen above. In the case of Town & Cooking, we highlighted some of the bright and crisp kitchen inspiration that Alex had initially mentioned in our discussions that came across as friendly and unique.
After all different types of discussions with a client, our team truly start to draw out the magic of what we think they’d like to visually include in their brand. This process can take as long as a client needs, and often involves great discussions with clients, looking at lists of visual website details that they like from other businesses, working along side them in their offices, or even taking a walk with them to gather a better sense of their intended tastes.
The initial logo and design stories
The fundamentals of design are always about connecting various aesthetics through all of the senses available to us, we choose to present initial design presentations as “stories.” Quite often these stories are accompanied by abstract or detailed descriptions of the inspiration used for each story, in addition to the types of emotion the designer has intended to draw out. Here’s what we came up with for Town & Cooking after this important period of collaboration:
Casual Tips in Design: Font Selection
Thursday, May 5, 2012by The BWD Team in Digital Experience
While the content of your blog post is extremely important, the visual appearance can project just as much of an impact on your overall message as well.To many, font selection may seem trivial, but the style in which a font is crafted and presented can make or break the total visual experience of a design.
Certain fonts are bold and eye-catching; these are generally used for headings and other important pieces of text. Other fonts are subtle and engaging to the eye; these are great for body text.
While working with a designer or completing your own design, it’s important to not mix too many varieties or styles no matter how cute you think things look as this can be very distracting for readers.
One important point in starting your journey through font selection is the distinction between serif and sans-serif fonts. From Wikipedia:
In typography, serifs are semi-structural details on the ends of some of the strokes that make up letters and symbols. A typeface with serifs is called a serif typeface (or serifed typeface). A typeface without serifs is called sans serif or sans-serif, from the French sans, meaning “without”.
4 Fonts and Their Visual Styles Explained
- Times New Roman: A serif proper font that gives off a conservative vibe; great for body text that is more academic or professional in nature. There are many fonts that are similar to Times New Roman that do this same trick as well.
- Arial: Another classic and very standard font that is great for body text and is sans-serif. It is much more contemporary than Times New Roman and has many sister fonts as well.
- Comic Sans MS: A casual font, which screams a much more child-like and non-serious tone in sans-serif form. The use of Comic Sans is generally discouraged by professional designers, but you’ll see it everywhere from legal documents to restaurant menus. Don’t make the same mistake and leave Comic Sans for comic books.
- Impact: A bold, blocky, sans-serif font that instantly grabs the readers’ attention. This font is very popular, and thus very prolific.
At Blog What? Design we use a great service called TypeKit to help our clients websites serve up unique and hard-to-find-fonts very easily. Sick of the same old font selections? Just let us know and we’ll get you started on a makeover.
Examples of Bad Font Combination in Posts
Stay clear of altering your existing website’s font selection in your WordPress editor and making mistakes that look like this.
Are you curious about the origins and history of font creation, also known as “Typography?” Then check out the history from Wikipedia here.
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