Choosing typefaces that work on paper

What survives ink

Typefaces with reasonably open counters — the enclosed spaces in letters like a, e and o — and without extremely thin strokes. Ultra-light weights and high-contrast display faces are the ones that suffer most, particularly on uncoated stock.

• Set body text no smaller than 8pt, and 9 to 10pt where anyone over forty will read it.
• Avoid hairline weights below 12pt.
• On uncoated paper, go a shade heavier than you would on coated.
• Two typefaces is plenty. Three is usually one too many.

Pairing without going wrong

The safest pairing is one typeface family used at different weights — a bold for headings, a regular for body. It cannot clash with itself, and it looks deliberate.

If you want two families, make them obviously different rather than slightly different. A serif with a sans works. Two similar sans faces read as a mistake, because the eye registers the difference without being able to justify it.

Licensing, which catches people out

A font downloaded free for personal use is frequently not licensed for commercial printing, and the licence is the customer’s responsibility rather than the printer’s.

Open-source families such as those in the Google Fonts library are licensed for commercial use and cover most needs comfortably. If you have paid for a font, check that the licence permits embedding in a PDF sent to a third party, because some do not.

The specifications this applies to

For reference, here is how it works out on the products this comes up on most often.

• Standard Visiting Cards — 89 × 51 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹2 per unit with a minimum of 100.
• Letterheads — 210 × 297 mm finished, 3 mm bleed, 300 DPI minimum, from ₹4 per unit with a minimum of 100.

Ordering

Every file is checked automatically before printing, so a mistake in any of this is caught while it can still be corrected rather than after a run is on paper.

Standard delivery is free to every PIN code in India — two working days to a metro, up to twelve to the islands — and prices include GST, so the figure on the product page is the figure charged. Add a GSTIN at checkout and the invoice carries it for input credit.

Before you send it

Print the design at actual size on an ordinary office printer and look at it on paper rather than on screen. Almost every problem — type too small, contrast too low, something too close to the edge — becomes obvious immediately at real size and is invisible at 200% zoom on a monitor.

Then read it out loud. It is the most reliable way to catch a missing word, and a missing word on 500 printed cards is not a small correction.