by AJ George
Last week I covered how a selective use of fonts can enhance the effectiveness of your eLearning and mLearning content. This week I have a few easy resources for working with fonts.
Adding Distinct Personality with Handwriting
Adding a touch of handwriting to learning presentations can help to convey playfulness, whimsy, or even formality, depending on the script font chosen. The obvious choice would be to use the stock script fonts found on most computers. But why not make it more personal with your own handwriting?
One option, if you have a Tablet PC and the free downloadable software My Fonts (or a similar setup), is to create your own fonts. For a good tutorial on how to create a font, click here. If you don’t have a Tablet PC, you can always have someone else do the work for you. For a relatively low fee (typically around $9) there are online sites where you can fill out and scan in a template of your own handwriting to be converted into a usable font. I’ve tried fontifier.com and was happy with the results, but if you’d like more options, a quick Google search will turn up many more.
If you’re in a time crunch (or maybe your handwriting is a bit on the unreadable side) and need a good resource for attractive and unique handwriting fonts fast, you can head over to Font For Peas and download their impressive selection of Scrapbook fonts that can look quite nice as eLearning accent fonts.
Tracking Down That Perfect Font
Often when I see a website or a bit of eLearning that has nice design, I’ll save a screen shot of it for later inspiration. This is good, in theory, but sometimes I’ll come across a successful use of a font that I don’t immediately recognize (and I don’t have the time to figure it out). So when What the Font was brought to my attention, I got a little giddy. With this MyFonts beta site, I can take a screen shot of the font I’m hunting down and upload it to their site for analysis.
Based on a character by character break down they provide a list of possible fonts as well as the origin of the fonts.
I’ve found the site to be pretty accurate and a definite design time saver.
Font Feedback
I received some great feedback last week from eLearning professionals on their favorite fonts. Here are the fonts our readers are using:
- Verdana
- Helvetica
- Arial
- Calibri
- Times
- Palatino
- Times New Roman
- Century Schoolbook (for print)
- Comic Sans (for casual documents)
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About the author: AJ George is IconLogic’s lead Technical Writer and author of the book “PowerPoint 2007: The Essentials” and “PowerPoint 2008 for the Macintosh: The Essentials.” You can follow AJ on Twitter at http://twitter.com/andrayajgeorge.