marketing ignited

You commented about my lack of imagination for the header font. I heard. I'll change.

I've been browsing the internet and came up with the following advice on picking fonts. Katherine Taylor suggests:

1. Top priority - combine font, color and size to make it readible.


2. You can't lose with classic typefaces that are the little black dresses of typography. Always appropriate and elegant are Garamond, Baskerville, or Caslon for serifs; Helvetica, Futura, or Myriad, are standard sans serifs. Helvetica and Garamond are your best friends.


3. Use a font appropriate for your medium. Georgia and Verdana were designed for web use. Think twice before using them in print.


4. Match your ad's message or theme with your font.


5. Don’t pick something too weird.


6. Break the rules, sometimes. Most of the time, serif=classic, traditional, and sans serif=modern. But if you’re feeling creatively stuck, try something different.

From the creativeblog, the suggestions are simple and sweet:

1. Font colors should flow with the theme of the ad. Default colors: black or white. Black and white are your best friends (I thought Helvetica and Garamond were)


2. Determine the graphic's mood and play along.

So I've got a tropical theme going on this ad. I want to have a Jamaican theme but quite honestly every time I hear the Jamaican song "One love, one world. Let's get together...." I instantly replace with my own words "One love, one world. Don't stray from your resort or I'll rob you blind..." I've got a feeling I'm not the only soul with this perception. So I won't be going too heavy on the Jamaican theme.

So tropics it is. Do I do knock out 'steel drum tropicals' or more 'spa in the tropics'?

Garden Party has a feel steel drum spa feel to it, but too skinny.

URW Abbey Bold has a 50s tourist brochure feel to it. I like its boldness, but not so spa-like.

Sarabella is lean more towards spa than steel drum. Still casual enough to work.

Nanumunga Bold is perfectly steel drum but missing the spa.

FG Adam, simple but too stringy.

And the winner, in my book is: Bittersweet NF. I was having a lot of problems with the captial 'G' in a lot of casual and script fonts. I was finding them hard to read. If 'G' started anything but the first word in the header, I wouldn't have minded. I like that it has an art deco feel. The large lower case letters make up for the overall stringyness of the font. The font used to spell out 'Tropical' I know I've seen before. Bittersweet NF hit its groove without being too fussy or too messy (another words, casual).

You probably noticed that I've made the header smaller. I wanted to keep it between the bushes and the shack. The header was just helping set the theme, it wasn't the overall message.