Typography choices that make or break your graphics
A short, opinionated guide to picking, pairing and using type in marketing graphics — with examples of what works and what quietly ruins a design.
By The Graphicly team
Ninety percent of what makes a graphic feel professional or amateur is typography. Color and layout matter, but type is the thing your reader is actually looking at. Most teams pick a font once and never revisit that decision. It is worth revisiting.
Pick two typefaces, not five
You need one typeface with personality for headlines and one neutral typeface for body copy. That is it. Every additional typeface is a chance for something to feel inconsistent.
Match the typeface to the mood
- Serifs — editorial, trustworthy, considered. Great for finance, media, and premium brands.
- Geometric sans — modern, clean, tech-forward. The default for SaaS.
- Humanist sans — friendly, warm, approachable. Great for consumer and lifestyle brands.
- Display faces — expressive, high-contrast. Use sparingly, and only for one word at a time.
The size scale that always works
Set your body text, then use a ratio: 1× body, 1.5× subhead, 2.5× headline, 4× hero. Rounded to whole numbers if you like. Consistency in scale is what makes a set of graphics feel like a system rather than a collection.
Kerning, tracking and line height
Tighten headlines by two or three percent. Loosen all-caps labels by five to ten percent. Body copy wants line height of about 1.5. If you only do these three things, your graphics will already look better than most.
What ruins a design faster than anything else
- Center-aligning long paragraphs of text.
- Setting body copy at the same weight as your headline.
- Justifying text so words get awkward gaps.
- Using a script font for anything longer than a signature.
How to test your type quickly
Squint at your design. If the hierarchy is still clear when the letters blur, your typography is working. If everything reads as one gray block, tighten the contrast between headline and body.
How Graphicly handles type for you
Set your two typefaces in your brand kit once. Every design Graphicly produces uses them at the right sizes with the right weights, so you get consistent type without having to think about it — even when a teammate is the one doing the chatting.