Choose your own font!
Being a Greeting Card Publisher we just love fonts. If I had my way we would publish each card with a dozen fonts but now that would be truly crazy! Instead we have listened to feedback and come up with a balanced approach. If we have a font that is curly and artistic, we will create a similar card but with a font that is almost the opposite in design and style. What’s working is then using a more plain or bolder font that can also allow for different positioning on the card.
Our cards are very flowery, to state the obvious, and so font choice makes a huge impact on the card and how the artwork is promoted over the card message. The example given in the collage added to this blog shows one of our most popular Anniversary cards with a lovely pale pink rose (the Sandton Smile Rose painted by the well-known watercolour Artists Patricia Wade) placed on a midnight blue background.
I remember when we printed our first card run of these midnight blue designs with a bold font of gold foil text, we were so worried about the combination of the dark background with a botanical floral image, that is traditionally seen on the original pale cream watercolour paper, and how it would be received in the market place. To our delight and surprise the combination was very well received and we have a number of the designs, including this one that gets sales every single day online.
So when we introduced the subtler cursive font, it was also a gamble, would people like it and more importantly buy it? Well they did. All it means is that we need to keep good stock of both designs as they sell just as well as each other. Truly this was an amazing revelation to understand that people are choosy about fonts nod that they also have a huge impact on whether a card is liked or not. I think our approach to providing two fonts/two cards for these designs has given much greater choice to our customers.
How did fonts come about? Well some basic facts are the word ‘Font’ comes from the French (of course) for ‘Fondre’ or to cast something. Like they did to create a font glyph that was placed in a sequence, inked and then introduced to the paper to produce printing. The term ‘Font’ in English appeared on the 16th century so we have been at this for a long time indeed. There are two main kinds of fonts, ‘serif’ and ‘sans serif’ (with and without a projection finishing off a letter). There are today hundreds of thousands of fonts and the first sans serif was created in 1816 which started the modern day look fonts we love today. A tip to enable easy comparison of fonts is to type the word ‘Handgloves’, although we use mainly ‘happy birthday’ and ‘happy anniversary’. And of course to add the term ‘italics’ to slant letters was invented by an Italian!
On that note have a great weekend and remember to contact us if you have any feedback for us on our cards, especially if you want more fonts!