Fontophile

I love me a good font.  I have definitely honed in on my favorites.  A few have asked about specific fonts, so I thought I would give you the details.  All the fonts I use came with my computer (I’m a Mac girl) or I downloaded them free.  Other than Helvetica, which is sold as a an entire font pack, all the links below lead to free downloads.

Lets start with the most obvious…the fonts in my logo.  I created the logo myself when I started the blog almost  two years ago.  Can you tell?  I am a total novice at graphic design, but I still like my logo so I must have done something right.  It originally was on a gray background with white ampersand, like you see now in my footer.  Unfortunately, the grey background was pretty restricting for other uses, so I switched it up with my recent header redesign (also done be me, the novice).  With the white background I made the ampersand gray.

I created my logo with three fonts.

Georgia / Bickham Script Pro / Helvetica

• Teal is in Georgia.
• Ampersand (&) is in Bickham Script Pro in a very large font size, because this script font is tiny.
• Lime is in Helvetica.  I use Photoshop Elements to turn it into an outline (that’s a topic for another post).

In addition to my logo, there are a few other fonts I have grown fond of.  I use them on the blog occasionally in images, and I use them for custom mood boards.

Lobster 1.4 / Albermarle Swash / Trendex Light SSi / Amperzand

• I use Lobster for the before and after labels on images.
• I use Trendex on mood boards and blog images like yesterday’s favorite sources roundup.  Sometimes I use the faux bold option in Photoshop Elements, because Trendex is really light, especially at small fonts or without a high contrast background.
• I use Albermarle Swash for mood board titles.  I like to use my outline trick on this one a lot to make it even fancier looking.
• Ampersandz – This is newer for me and I am still waiting for it to grow on me.  I used it in the favorite sources roundup graphic.

I love combining Trendex and Albermarle for my mood board titles.  The contrast between the thin modern font and the bolder script font makes me happy.

I also have an obsession with chalkboard art.  I have used some faux (digital) chalkboard art for my recent Valentines printables and all the graphics for my DIY or Buy Series.  These are my favorite fonts to use on a chalkboard background.  I mess around with the opacity to get them a little more chalk-like.

Sketch Rockwell / Ostrich Sans (shown in Bold) / Type Keys / Handwriting Draft

As much as I love fonts, I limit how many of them I use for branding purposes.  I prefer to stay consistent and keep my fonts recognizable.  I experimented more in the beginning, but now all of my mood boards use a combo of Trendex Light and Albermarle Swash.  The fonts from my logo flow into other areas of my blog.  Georgia for post titles and headers.  Helvetica for body text and navigation labels.