Choosing a font for your personal and family stories can be complicated. About a decade ago, I wrote an article entitled “What Font are You?” Looking back, I realize I only touched on how to choose the best font for personal and family stories.

Of course, the old “your mileage may vary” caveat applies. Your decision might differ from mine.

Are you sharing your stories online, through another virtual media, or in print?

Many font choice considerations apply regardless of media type, but there are differences. For starters, some digital platforms, such as blogs, newsletters, and eBooks have built-in templates with recommendations on font family, size, and color. In addition, e-readers and digital devices allow readers to enlarge displays.

Compatibility between Devices

There can also be font availability issues with niche fonts. You many have it on your computer, but if the user doesn’t have it loaded on theirs, their device will pick an alternative. You might not like what they choose.

However, these fonts can make great choices for print materials or presentations.

So how do you decide?

How to Publish your Memories and Stories shows you a lot of the options.

Deciding whether you want to publish your stories in print (hard copy) or digitally is a function of accessibility, reach, and your own comfort level with technology. With a publishing platform such as Amazon, you could also do both.

However, you’ll also have to look at how your website looks on a mobile device or tablet.

Why Font Choices Matter

Think of it this way. If you’ve spent hours and hours on a labor of love, you want to make it easy for your readers to engage with what you’ve written. This is why we spend time editing and proofreading. (You’re doing that, right?)

Choosing a readable font is another step in this process.

Sometimes family historians overlook this. We’re willing to wade through 18th and 18th  century handwriting to find nuggets of information about our ancestors. We forget how important visual appeal can be in keeping readers engaged.

How to Choose a font for your stories and books

As a recent article from Readable.com points out, despite a lot of research and experts weighing in, there is no one-size fits all for font choices. [1]

Which, in a way, is great. Writing is a creative endeavor, and it would be sad if everyone’s stories looked exactly alike. On the other hand, there are arguments for curbing some of your creativity.

Readability & Digestibility

Readability and digestibility don’t depend on font face or what you may think of as typeface alone. It also includes white space (discussed below), word choices, and sentence lengths. In this post, we’ll look more closely at readability.

CreativeMarket.com, a font design website, helps us break that down:

Legibility refers to the ease of distinguishing individual characters from one another, a factor influenced by the specific letterform designs, …

Clarity … pertains to the overall legibility of blocks of text, impacted by factors like line spacing (leading), font contrast (the difference in the thickness of main strokes and embellishments), and the choice of clear fonts.

Readability

Which fonts are the most legible for readers? Which ones facilitate fluid reading?

There are a lot of opinions among the experts. It’s also important to note, the best font for paper might not be the best for screen reading.

It also depends on your audience. For instance, a college professor may read best with a serif font like Times New Roman. (These are fonts with small strokes or lines attached to letters, as you can see in the image below.) It’s what he or she is used to. In contrast, a beginning reader does best with a sans-serif font. There’s less to decipher.

So, it makes sense to look at your target audience. Are they advanced readers? Are they older? More educated? A mix of the above?

Notice the word “target” above. If you want to reach a particular demographic, be careful not to exclude them with your font-choices.

One great way to narrow your choices is to look at what professional print and web designers recommend. Keep in mind though that marketing has different goals than print book publishing. I found the best results searching with “Print book publishing font recommendations 2024.”

Whereas generic recommendations for font size are 10-12 points, for older audiences you might go with 12 points fonts. However, sizing varies between fonts, so be sure to experiment.

Serif or Sans Serif

There’s no hands down right or wrong on those little lines on typefaces.

Research tends to show (there are always arguments on methodology) that those flourishes help the eyes of people with good reading skills and vision move fluidly across the page. [2]

However, what works for some can slow others down. For beginning readers and those with vision impairment, those serifs make it harder and less enjoyable to read. [3]

Inclusivity in fonts

If your potential reading audience includes older generations, it’s important to pay attention to inclusivity recommendations.

Brad Pettengill explains why older people have problems with some fonts.

“… Advancing age causes the pupils to shrink, less light enters the eye, causing vision problems in low-light environments.

…The eye’s lens loses elasticity, becomes less able to focus while reading.

… Age-related eye diseases include macular degeneration, which is vision loss in the center of the visual field; glaucoma, which affects side or peripheral vision; cataracts, which cause blurred vision, faded colors and glare; and diabetic retinopathy, in which damaged retinal blood vessels cause blurred vision, severe vision loss and blindness.”[4]

For these reasons, he and others recommend an especially readable font (typeface), larger font sizes, and good contrasting colors.

ADA recommendations on Choosing a Font

ADA refers to the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990. As a result of this legislation, we get great recommendations on how to best reach individuals with visual and cognitive disabilities in print and online mediums.

For body text, sans-serif is preferred. There are a lot of counter recommendations as well.

• Not italic
• Not oblique
• Not scripts
• Not highly decorative or unusually shaped[5]

In other words, save the more decorative fonts for headlines and sub-titles.

Other Considerations

Writing is a creative pursuit, yet the craft of storytelling calls on us to consider our reader’s experience.

Personal preference

While choosing a font, select one that appeals to you, but will also be good for your readers. For instance, experts rate comic sans  as a highly legible font. However, it doesn’t appeal to me. At all. Maybe it’s the association I have in my head of Microsoft Word’s 1995 annoying paper clip “helper” or it’s over-use or it’s childish look.

Since there are other options, I have the luxury of not using it. For highly legible fonts, my favorites include Lato, Open Sans, and Atkinson’s hyperlegible.

Style

You don’t have to limit yourself to one font-face, but make sure your fonts blend well together. (See Canva’s font paring recommendations.)

Others recommend keeping your choices within the same font family for a more cohesive look.

Alignment

If you’re using the same document for print and electronic devices, chose left alignment for your body and headings. This makes documents easier to read.[6] It’s especially important in electronic documents. Those headings in the middle of the page may be missed by readers paging down on their devices.

Other Recommendations

Spacing, white space, readability, colors, word choices, and sentence length can all impact how readers digest what we write.

I put white space, line spacing, letter spacing, sentence length, and the use of a logical hierarchy of headings and subheadings under the digestibility heading. Readers don’t reward us when we make them work harder to decipher words on a page. In addition to a larger font size, I suggest 1.15 to 1.5 line-spacing.

Also, don’t narrow your margins too much either. That white space helps readers absorb what is written.

Printing Considerations (a case study)

This post came to mind as I am trying to convince my church to stop using Arial Narrow, which I think was originally adopted to cut down on print costs.

However, that goal is in line with other church goals, as we consider good communication paramount. Experts almost unanimously recommend this font in titles only.

The same probably goes for your stories. Print costs are a consideration but think about where it ranks compared to your readers and your family’s enjoyment of your stories.

Licensing

Before using a font, make sure they are free for use you have the appropriate license to use them. If a license says “for personal use only,” you cannot use it if you want to earn money.

Your Turn

What have you learned about choosing a font for your family history and personal storytelling pursuits? Please comment below.

Further Reading

Hilary Palmen, “How type influences readability,” Google Fonts, https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/readability_and_accessibility/how_type_influences_readability.

Footnotes

[1] “New study shows font readability is very individual,” Readble.com, January 26, 2023, https://readable.com/blog/new-study-shows-font-readability-is-very-individual/.

[2] Oksana Tymoshchuk, “Font Readability Research: Key Difference Between Serif Vs Sans Serif Font,” Geniusee, June 30, 2021, https://geniusee.com/single-blog/font-readability-research-famous-designers-vs-scientists#concepointss_legibility_vs_readability.

[3] “Understanding Accessible Fonts and Typography for Section 508 Compliance,” Section508.gov, Accessed April 24, 2024, https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/.

[4] Brad Pettengill,” Vision Changes: Typography for Aging Audiences,” March 23, 2017, Marketing Partners, https://www.marketing-partners.com/conversations2/vision-changes-typography-for-aging-audiences

[5] “Understanding Accessible Fonts and Typography for Section 508 Compliance,” Section508.gov, Accessed April 24, 2024, https://www.section508.gov/develop/fonts-typography/.

[6] “Making Your Printed Materials ADA Accessible,” Zag Interactive, Febrauary 20, 2020, https://www.zaginteractive.com/insights/february-2020/making-your-printed-materials-ada-accessible.