Typeface pairing tip: stress matching.
We all know how difficult it is to match fonts.
In addition to the results of the entire enterprise being highly subjective (your Papyrus-and-Comic Sans may look great to, erm, Stevie Wonder), there’s such a plethora of typefaces around that it’s easy to feel lost before you’ve even started.
Are there solutions to this problem? Some. For example, you could purchase Typewolf’s Type Pairing Lookbooks for some amazing suggestions, but that would mean owning the fonts contained therein or that font you really want to use not being included in them. Still, they are amazing resources to have at hand (I own all of them) and an essential purchase for anyone passionate with typography, second only to my typography book, Clothes For Language (hey, I got a family to feed)
Other solutions include Googling for pairing suggestions, or reading the entrails of chickens, although I’ve found that reading the leftover bones of KFC hot wings can work just as good.
Anyway. Last Saturday I was casually joyscrolling through Twitter, when I came upon a great thread with tons of cool design tips taken from TikTok. I know. I hate it too. Fuck Saturdays.
But hear me out: on that thread, I saw an interesting method of matching typefaces. Now, it doesn’t mean that I’ve tested it extensively or that I recommend it without reservation but it’s a type pairing suggestion, not the coronavirus vaccine, dude.
The actual tip
Ok, after the pretty sizeable introduction/rant, here’s the tip.
Pair typefaces whose characters (it’s much easier to see with the letter ‘o’) have the same stress direction. There’s not a definition of stress that satisfies me, but here is what I mean
In the top pairing, the stress of the ‘o’ in Montserrat is vertical, while the stress of the ‘o’ in Cormorant Garamond is at an angle.
In the bottom pairing, both typefaces have vertical stresses, and so they pair better together.
Again, let me stress (oh! high five!) that this isn’t always necessarily the case but I thought that it was an interesting tip worth mentioning.
