3.5 Color & Font Combinations

Hello! Welcome back. We are going to look at color and font combos here as we round out the Developing a Style Template section of our magazine. Now, we've touched on this a little bit with creating character and paragraph styles, and headlines and all of that, but I just want to give you a few more tips as you're working through your magazine design. Now it's important to really take a moment and plan this out if you can. Now I've mentioned that I design on the fly, but I've been doing this for many, many years. So it's a lot easier for me to kinda lay this out and then go back and investigate color options. But it's important for you to consider this, because what colors you choose, and what fonts you choose are really going to dictate how this magazine feels and looks to your audience. And what I mean is this, are you looking for a modern design? If you're looking for a modern design, and this is how I, my design style typically is very modern. It's very clean, lot of white space, lot of sharp lines, a lot of shapes. And the colors that I use, and the fonts that I use reflect that. So you'll see, for example, in this headline, you'll see a very strong, bold sans-serif font, but then I offset that in my paragraph text with a sans-serif font, so I always mix and match. But what you choose here will determine if that modern style Is consistent throughout your entire design, and there's ways to vary that from article to article, as I have shown you before. So again, the color choices here, this cool gray, cool blue with a very warm orange, again creates that modern edge. But if this was to be something completely different, if you wanted it to be more traditional and less modern, then you would change the colors and the fonts accordingly and you wouldn't use such strong fonts. Instead, you would maybe, for example, change this to. A serif font, and then I will show you what that looks like. And already it's changed. And more likely you would not capitalize that in such a way. And see, right now you can still mix and match, that actually looks okay. But, if you want to stick to that, this would, again, be. The same font, okay? And then, what you would do Is investigate other color options that was not the sort of cool orange and blue. If you wanted something a little bit more traditional, you might play around with some purples. More pastel colors, for example, would greatly change this up quite a bit. And I am just picking some random colors here hoping it's going to work out. Okay. But see how immediately that changed drastically, and I would get rid of that, okay. Now, when you look at these side by side, you know right away that you would not necessarily have both of these styles existing in the same magazine. Okay, that's what's important. If you're gonna stick to a color palette and a font selection, you need to stick with that throughout the majority of your magazine. Now the only way that this may change up is with your ads, because you may or may not be designing ads. You cannot control the fonts that are placed in those ads. But you'll notice even a theme with outside ad revenue, that they're gonna be placing something in your magazine, it's going to fit that theme, okay? So, if you're having a high-end luxury magazine, then you're gonna have ads that reflect that. Therefore, those styles should match to some degree. If you are more urban, more fun in that regard, again, you're going to get ads that reflect that. Advertisers place ads in media that will generate an audience for them based on their own audience. So, looking at this again, you can see that these do not necessarily mesh. So, you can develop whatever style you want just by changing up your fonts and colors. But, whatever palette you choose, make sure that you use those character and paragraph styles over here to lock those in so that you end up having a consistent and cohesive design, based on the colors that you choose. And again, once you have that set, you can so easily play around with different options. And you can see this live in action as you maneuver around those colors. And you can change those quickly. You know monochromatic colors, great option for you, that is super fun design option there. Look at that. Just a dark blue and a light blue, that looks great. And if you want to offset that with some color, same thing. You can stay cool, or you can stay warm. The best thing for you is to just really get familiar with colors, but again, just clicking around is a great way to see what works and what doesn't work too. You can't really mess this up, and that's why I love to design sometimes on the fly. And once I have something set, I'll go back through and just make sure that there aren't any other colors that I like, or fonts that I like. Now one thing to note here is that when you're working with your colors and your fonts, I say this time and time again in all of my print design courses, you want to limit your fonts and colors to three, if possible. Especially with your fonts. So you can see here that we have, our headline has a font, this is a different font, this is a different font and that's a different font. So we've almost pushed the limit here, but I will say that your paragraph text can be that fourth font because there's so much of it, that it will be less obvious than what you choose in your headlines. So, this area right here you definitely don't wanna go over three. But you'll notice that even though we have three right here, these two are very similar, they're both sans-serif fonts, they're both capitalized. So they're not too far from each other. Where we have again, a lot of the same paragraph text and here we just have two. We have a serif and a serif, they're just different versions of that, so it's a little cleaner here. So you can definitely play with that, but try to stick to that three rule and just use different sizes, different colors, and different placement of those three fonts so it doesn't get overwhelming. Same thing with colors, you don't want to overload this. For example, I'm gonna show you right now. And, there's a chance this may actually look good. [LAUGH] But it doesn't actually look that bad, but I will say that. You don't wanna go overboard with tons of colors, unless it's intentional. It's like that blue, wearing, sorry, wearing brown and black together, it's always like no, but I say you can do it as long is it looks like it's intentional. So there may be a case for you to have a very multicolored page. But you can tell right now, that without this being intentional, that's probably not the way to go. It's very overwhelming, I don't know where to look, and actually I'm looking over here at this yellow cuz it's so bright in contrast. And that's not the first thing you want people to see. You want people to see your headline, so that needs to stand out. So you need to limit that to some degree, and have a plan. Make those colors work for you, and all you have to do is have a plan and then just reproduce those throughout. And as we work through our feature articles in the next set of lessons you'll see this in action, and it'll start to make a lot more sense to you.