There are a lot of fonts. If you go to a design tool, you'll notice that there are hundreds or dozens of different fonts. But most of them are useless, and most of them are fonts that you should never use. So, if you're just starting and if you're not really comfortable with design yet, you should completely always avoid decorative fonts, handwriting fonts, and in most cases serif fonts as well. And I know this sounds really crazy and over the top, but most serif fonts are not really that easy to work with,
and you need to be able to set the spacing and leading, kerning and everything in the proper way for them for the digital interfaces to work well. So, it's best for the initial time that you're working on your designs to just *stick to sans serifs*. And I have a short list of fonts that are basically safe. There is a couple more – you can find them somewhere, but you don't really need a lot more when you're starting. If you're testing your design skills, if you're learning design,
a couple of these fonts are all you need, and especially right now if you're looking for a good free font, I would recommend Plus Jakarta Sans because it's one of the better-looking fonts out there, it's completely free and it looks good in most scenarios. So, don't use those decorative fonts, don't use those fancy fonts, because the simpler they are, the better they look. And another thing about font is that somehow people have this notion of thinking
that if a font is thin or light, it's kind of synonymous with minimal design, and that minimal design like the Swiss style – you know – super-minimal design was actually pushed by Apple at some point with iOS 7 if what I remember is correct, but they quickly reverted to that because those fonts don't really display well on most screens. They are too thin, and they are basically not readable. So, just *go for regular and bold in most cases*
and don't go for those thin and light fonts in your designs. Because as you can see here, it's just a lot easier to read the window on the right side. And also, if you're starting, don't create a ton of different font sizes. You should have like a heading, a smaller heading and everything else as just one font. So, in practice this is another like a pop-up window that shows a couple of different elements, and we have just one size for the title.
And then the second size with different weights – one is bold; the rest are regular – is used for all of the other things. And if we switch it to four different font sizes on a small window like that, it's going to make our brain think, 'Oh my God – I need to process all that!' So, *just make it easy for the brain and just switch it to a much simpler option* because it's just always going to work better, and of course, a lot of the rules that I'm going to share with you are rules that you can break once you feel confident about breaking them.
So, *when you're just starting, just don't break them*.