A sensual and esoteric art form that can make or break a design.  Similar to pairing wine and food, it almost requires a certain type of sensual genius.  It seems that in my practice as a designer I have developed several of my own rules of thumb that come from my personal (acquired) taste and design sensibility.  Everyone is familiar with simple tricks like the juxtaposition of a serif typeface with a sans-serif, or thick juxtaposed against thin, uppercase versus lowercase, letterspaced versus unletterspaced.

But I think these basic rules aren’t enough (perhaps they are even trite!).  Font-pairing/font-mixing has deeper, sensual, even emotional potential that, when unleashed, can really make a design jive.  Since I saw this months ago, I can’t get this guide to mixing fonts from Hoefler & Frere Jones out of my design brain.   Sure, it’s a crafty marketing tool meant to double or triple the size of a HFJ customer’s shopping cart, but some of the font wisdom in here is particularly rich!  I love embracing and indulging in the subjective qualities of type (levity, gravity, repose, aggression, etc) instead of simply responding to the objective features (serif, x-height, etc).  Maybe I like reading it because it kind of puts into words what I have more or less always intuited in my designs but could never define.

Here I’ve extracted the major rules from the guide:

“A palette with wit: use typefaces with complementary moods to evoke an upbeat, energetic air.”

“A palette with energy: Mix typefaces from the same historical period whose families have different features.”

“A palette with poise: mix typefaces with a similar line quality if they offer different textures.”

“A palette with dignity: mix typefaces with similar proportions and give each a different role”

Bon apetit!

Font preview image from Typedesk. Download LH Line1 Sans here.

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