Font Love! Expert Wedding Fonts Advice, with Pictures and Examples

Font Love! (Wed­ding fonts advice)

Claire (the brains behind this blog) and I were recently talk­ing about how the US wed­dings and blogs seem so much more pas­sion­ate about sta­tionery on aver­age than here in the UK. I pon­dered this and in some ways US wed­dings, at least on blogs, do seem com­par­a­tively big bud­get affairs. There are also sup­pli­ers of there that I wish we had an equiv­a­lent of here but we just don’t unfor­tu­nately. But after all that maybe there is still a bit more love for sta­tionery in the US than here. So I thought I should share some of my pas­sion for sta­tionery and design in a way that could help many peo­ple whether they a poten­tial client of mine www.artemisstationery.co.uk, Claire’s cal­lig­ra­phy busi­ness calligraphy-for-weddings.com or another sta­tioner (appar­ently they do exist!) to some­one mak­ing their own stationery.

So with that in mind obvi­ously not every­one is that arty or crafty but I want to talk about some­thing that every­one can indulge in. Which brings me to fonts. If you don’t want to really dwell on your choice of fonts then use Times New Roman: it’s so com­monly seen it won’t break any style or look you are try­ing to achieve for your wed­ding and it’s actu­ally a very well designed and good look­ing font. But if you think that the invi­ta­tion is impor­tant and sets the tone for what is to come and can spare a few min­utes please read on.

The mar­vel­lous, almost won­drous thing about wed­ding fonts is there is such an amaz­ing and broad range out there. There is prob­a­bly a font for any style or look you could think of and you don’t need any abil­ity to cre­ate a font to use it. You might be think­ing now if you’re mak­ing your own wed­ding sta­tionery that Microsoft Word or Pub­lisher doesn’t really give you much choice and that they’re all a bit so so. Don’t panic! — there is a whole world of fonts out there and many are free. Just google ‘free fonts’ and you will find tonnes of web­sites with fonts free for pri­vate use. Down­load them and if on a PC right click, select install and done! I really love them and think they’re very use­ful in help­ing define the style and atmos­phere of a wed­ding, so I offer my clients a lot to choose from with many more on the way when the new web­site launches.

Some pos­si­bil­i­ties for wed­ding fonts:

With script fonts you can cre­ate an ele­gant and opu­lent look or one which is whim­si­cal and jovial. The let­ters flow with ease and grace and I think the cap­i­tals from some of these fonts are mini works of art in them­selves. There is more on script fonts on AS Invites (my sta­tionery blog) — Script wed­ding fonts blog

Script wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

With Art Deco fonts you can hark back to the roar­ing twen­ties and the period which the Great Gatsby was set in. When west­ern economies were boom­ing and the indus­trial age and mod­ernism brought a styl­ish, clean look with influ­ences from global travel and antiq­uity (see my arti­cle on Art Deco if you would like to know more) .

wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

If you’re after a vin­tage or retro look there are so many fonts you can use. Think of Vic­to­rian posters or turn of the cen­tury car­ni­vals. Open face fonts where the thick part of the fonts are essen­tially cut out look won­der­ful and you could also look for dis­tressed type­writer or sten­cil fonts. Visit my blog for more spe­cific ideas on wed­ding fonts to cre­ate a vin­tage style.

wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

Fonts that look like hand­writ­ing can give a more infor­mal look which is good for a relaxed occasion.

wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

Take a more quirky or eccen­tric look on things or use big and blocky fonts with bright colours for a fun and bold look.

wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

Wed­ding fonts: a lit­tle extra knowledge:

If you’ve heard of serif and sans serif fonts but don’t know what they are, con­sider the fonts Times New Roman and Arial. If you think of a T from each font, the Arial T is formed by two strokes, one ver­ti­cal and one hor­i­zon­tal. The T in Times New Roman also has these stokes but addi­tion­ally had some lit­tle dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments at the bot­tom and the ends of the hor­i­zon­tal stroke. These are called ser­ifs. So you have fonts with them, these are serif and with­out them sans serif.

Cal­li­graphic fonts you see online are likely to be ones that are made to look like they were made by a pen with a wide nib where changes in the thick­ness of the stroke are achieved by mov­ing the pen at a dif­fer­ent angle. If you look at some of Claire’s work though you’ll see that cal­lig­ra­phy can cover more script like fonts.

Brush fonts are fonts that are made to look like they were done with a paint brush.

Black­let­ter fonts look very medieval and are also used for the names of news­pa­pers like the Daily Telegraph.

Script may also be known as cur­sive. It describes the style of writ­ing that was able to start with the intro­duc­tion of paper which is much smoother than parch­ment and allowed a dif­fer­ent quicker style of writing.

A lit­tle tech­nique with wed­ding fonts

(for those mak­ing their own invites)

So you might be think­ing this is all very well but most of these fonts are really hard to read, if you use them things are just going to get com­pli­cated. You’d be right, that is a risk but there are ways around it. That is by using the very dec­o­ra­tive but hard-to-read font as a fea­ture font and using a more read­able one for the main text.

For exam­ple, if you’re doing the text for your invites why not put your names and the guests’ names in a fea­ture font and the rest of the text in a plainer font? When I design infor­ma­tion pages in invi­ta­tions I may put sec­tion titles like Accom­mo­da­tion, Loca­tion etc. in the fea­ture font rather than using bold to pick the titles out.

wed­ding fonts ideas com­piled by Artemis Sta­tionery www.artemisstationery.co.uk

If you are sold on the joy of fonts you may be think­ing it’s all very well but they’re going to be in the mid­dle of your card and you have to do some­thing for the cover as you’re mak­ing them your­self. Why not just get some really nice card to print on and make it sin­gle sided, these flat invi­ta­tions can look really good if you do a good job of lay­ing out the text. You could mount them on a sec­ond sheet of card or maybe exper­i­ment with rib­bons and bows if you think that looks too plain.

A Con­clu­sion:

If you’re look­ing and now con­vinced and want to find your own wed­ding fonts, get on Google or check out my own blog’s arti­cles on fonts http://asinvites.com/ . If you’re look­ing for a wed­ding sta­tioner who is pas­sion­ate about mak­ing unique and bespoke sta­tionery for their clients come and check out my web­site Artemis Sta­tionery http://www.artemisstationery.co.uk.