Bold Fonts:
Bold fonts have always been popular in print design and advertising, but can often be under-looked in website design. However, bold typography is a great way to give designs a little extra punch and can do wonders for your image. Bold typography is all about creating impact, but it’s important to remember to direct that impact appropriately. Don’t just stick in huge welcome text if it’s going to detract from important content. Large, bold fonts can really grab your visitors attention, but that doesn’t mean that writing out bold text will automatically look professional. It’s not about the font, but what you do with it!
Styling Bold Text:
The examples below show how a little font styling can really make your bold text stand out. This kind of styling is very easy to do, but the attention to detail is what will do wonders for your overall impact.
5 Best Free Bold Fonts:
It can be really difficult to find great free fonts, as many look unprofessional or cheap. However, I’ve trawled the net and dug up my personal 5 favorite free bold fonts for you to download. All of these fonts are super professional, and hopefully they’ll give your next design a typographical boost!
Bold Text in Web Design:
Many well designed websites utilize bold typography as an eye catching way to draw visitors into exploring their site and/or services. Done wrong, bold typography can be distracting, ugly and ultimately pointless. However, the 10 sites below are all great examples of how to include bold typography in your designs:
Mike Precious uses great font-choice and subtle lighting/gradients to immediately draw the user’s eye. In this case the audience are first drawn to his work, as this takes visually precedence over the header/menu.
This website uses very bold, large headlines to immediately ‘wow’ the user. The user’s eye is drawn down the page, associating the similar typography near the top and bottom, as well as by the repeated ‘re’ message.
VideoHive use some lovely chunky typography to first explain what their site is all about and then draw people further into the site by encouraging them to learn more and sign up. By using images of text rather than plain text they can apply gradients and drop shadows to their headings to make them even more eye catching.
Alpha Multimedia Solutions creates an instant brand with their huge typographical logo. The way that the logo feeds into the main content area naturally draws the users eye downwards to explore their web page.
Evershed Golf create a central focus to their website, in order to draw attention to their events and popular golf school.
Logo Design Love combine their logo and heading into a bold footer. This instantly creates a brand, whilst letting visitors know what the site is all about.
Helvetireader uses a bold, bright heading to give personality to what would otherwise be quite a minimalist layout.
HugeType combines bold typography with a nice photo in order to create a striking header.
The Autumn Film push bold typography to poster like proportions. The white on red contrast is really striking, and really captures your attention.
Giant Creative also create a central focus to their website, through a use of elegant fonts and subtle background patterns.
Articles
Link to a few articles on bold typography.
Finding Inspiration in Type and Color
Typography is Sexy: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Breathtaking Typographical Posters
Your Thoughts
I would love to know what everyone thinks about bold typography in design, and feel free to share any of your favorite designs or principles in the comments to this post.
29 Comments so Far:
Comment by Max on December 22, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Great article, and great fonts!
Comment by Edwin on December 22, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Great article! Thnx!
Comment by NetOperator Wibby on December 22, 2008 at 10:39 pm
This has been a really inspirational post. Thanks for the fonts as well!!
Comment by David Airey on December 22, 2008 at 11:05 pm
One of my favourite websites that uses bold type is ilovetypography.com (the changing header typefaces for various blog posts is a nice touch too).
Have a great new year!
Comment by Tom on December 23, 2008 at 4:10 am
I’m glad you guys enjoyed the post. I’ll be posting much more full articles like this in the near future, trying to focus on quality over quantity (of course still posting regularly as well though). And I’ll also still be posting the tutorials that everyone is used to
Comment by Tom on December 23, 2008 at 4:30 am
Oh and David: ILoveTypography is definitely an awesome website. Thanks for sharing it with the community here.
Comment by Paul on December 23, 2008 at 7:35 am
Thanks, i always have trouble finding a good bold font, this article might give me alternatives to helvetica.
Comment by Andrew Houle on December 23, 2008 at 10:25 am
Great post, I love the choices for the websites showcased, and I’m downloading some of those free fonts now, thanks Tom!
Comment by James on December 23, 2008 at 11:41 am
Fantastic Article!Very useful and informative to me since I’m constantly looking for new font resources for my web design works.
Thank you very much for sharing this
Comment by max / myows on December 23, 2008 at 1:33 pm
This is great ! I’m going towards using this kind of typo for my next designs… thanks for the article !
Comment by Stu | Selfconclusion.co.uk on December 23, 2008 at 3:06 pm
This is a great post thanks! lots of good typography on show here
Comment by Bill on December 23, 2008 at 3:32 pm
Great roundup of fonts and sites using big bold type.
Comment by kiran on December 23, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Good post.Very interesting article.
Comment by G-Units on December 23, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Nice font, and nice article great job !
Comment by Tom on December 23, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Cheers guys!
Comment by Stephen Coles on December 23, 2008 at 9:13 pm
If the freebies don’t do it for you, here is a list of professional extra bold fonts.
Comment by Patti on December 23, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Good article. I can never learn enough about typography. Very helpful. Thanks.
Comment by agilius on December 24, 2008 at 7:21 am
I find these fonts useful :),it’s a nice article. Thanks!
Comment by Josh of Cubicle Ninjas on December 24, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Beautiful! Thank you for the free fonts.
I’d love to throw my website into the mix:
http://cubicleninjas.com
Comment by Ilya Radchenko on December 24, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Great article. Personally I haven’t really utilized bold fonts to such an extent. I’ll have it in mind next design!
Comment by cutt on December 24, 2008 at 11:38 pm
great post, thanks…
Comment by Vincenzo on December 25, 2008 at 10:02 am
really usefull! tnx
Comment by Jtee1991 on December 25, 2008 at 2:33 pm
it’s a great and useful post
Comment by Tony on December 25, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Sweet fonts, I’d love to see another post for large fonts rather then bold.
Comment by Sean Neill on December 26, 2008 at 2:11 am
I’ve always wondered what font is used for the headlines on all the Envato marketplace sites. Now I know - it’s Kabel. Thanks
By the way, this big/bold type look is truly beautiful.
Pingback by Looking Back at 2008 (Plus News and Flickr Roundup) - psdfan.com - on December 31, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[...] I try a more ‘article’ like format and decide to discuss bold typography. - This post makes the front page of delicious and also gets stumbled a lot, drawing in a lot of traffic. [...]
Comment by Brian on January 9, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Great article. I’m a big fan of Agenda Black which is used in some of the site you featured. I’m trying to find something like Agenda Black but free. Free is always better.
Comment by Kim on January 12, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Check another free fonts collection at - tools.khrido.com/webtools/fonts-collection.aspx
Comment by Darrel on May 27, 2009 at 5:19 am
akaChen appears to be a bad auto-trace of the commercial face aachen.
Kabel is not a free font.
I’m all for free fonts. There are some great ones, but please don’t link to crappy knock-offs of well designed typefaces.
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