Define Your eLearning Style with Capsule Fonts

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There is a fashion trend sweeping the internet right now. Yes, I said fashion trend. Don’t worry, this is still the Everything eLearning Blog. We have not changed it to the Everything Stephanie and Christie Wear Blog. Yet.

Fashion bloggers, business professionals, stay-at-home moms, and more are all embracing the Capsule Wardrobe Movement. I embraced it for all of three days, and then decided I loved my clothes more than I loved minimalism. Essentially, you pare down your wardrobe to anywhere from 30-50 pieces—depending on your lifestyle and work requirements—for each three-month season. The idea is that it helps you define your personal style and gives you more time to focus on the more important things happening in other aspects of your life, because you’re not spending 25 minutes every morning trying to decide what to wear.

So, what if you created a capsule wardrobe for your eLearning content?

What if you limited yourself to three fonts and four colors per project? What if you said “I will only use photo-realistic graphics from now on?”

The result: cleaner, simpler eLearning design with more time to focus on creating engaging interactions and dynamic quizzes.

Take it from art director Matilda Kahl in New York, who actually wears the exact same outfit to work every day and says having a uniform keeps her from having creative fatigue when she’s working during the week. Or talk to Courtney Carver, one of the frontrunners of the capsule wardrobe trend. “All creatives like to express themselves through what they wear, but they’re finding they are better able to focus their creative energies when they’re not thinking about how to create the perfect look.”

Here are a few tips and suggestions for starting your capsule font collection:

1. Pair typefaces that are in the same superfamily—like Batman and Robin. Just kidding! A superfamily (or type system) is a family of fonts that contains a large set of weights and widths. Check out this example from Google Fonts.

roboto

2. Play with similarity and contrast. Using two typefaces that are similar to each other—in things like x-height, ascenders, descenders, terminal shape, etc.—can create a consistent tone for your content. Be careful though—if you choose two fonts that are too similar, you might as well just use the same font. Using radically different fonts brings a balance and visual hierarchy to your page. An easy way to bring in contrast is to pair a serif typeface and a sans serif typeface.

raleway

3. Scope out Pinterest. You can find tons of font combinations and design ideas on Pinterest. For example, Pinterest led me to this graphic from blogger SFGirlByBay:

pairings

Keep in mind—many of the fonts recommended on Pinterest aren’t free, or aren’t standard system fonts. But if you find a font pair you just have to use, this guest blog by Sergey Snegirev walks you through how to use custom fonts in Lectora® eLearning software.

Can’t get enough of fonts and eLearning design? Here are a few more design resources from the Everything eLearning Blog:

As always, don’t forget to subscribe, so you get all our great posts. And let me know if you decide to try out a capsule font collection—or a capsule wardrobe!