Typography for People Who Don't Design

If you’ve ever stared at a slide deck, a poster, or even a long email and thought something feels off but I can’t say what — it’s almost always typography. Not the font. The typography. Most non-designers think those are the same thing. They’re not. Picking a font is maybe ten percent of typography. The other ninety percent is what you do with it. This post is for people who don’t have the time or interest to become designers, but who still have to put words on a page now and then. Five rules. That’s it.

Rule one: pick two fonts and stop. Most amateur design problems start with five fonts on one page, all fighting each other. Pick one font for headings (something with character — a sturdy serif or a confident sans) and one font for body text (something quiet you can read for paragraphs without getting tired). Then forbid yourself from adding a third. If your tools default to Calibri or Arial, that’s fine. Default fonts are not the enemy. Inconsistency is.

Rule two: line length matters more than font size. A line of text that runs the full width of a 27-inch monitor is unreadable, no matter how nice the font is. Aim for roughly 50 to 75 characters per line — about a sentence and a half. If your text is too wide, your reader’s eye loses its place between lines and gives up halfway through. The fix is almost always: make the text column narrower, not the font bigger.

Rule three: leading is a free upgrade. Leading (pronounced “ledding”) is the space between lines of text. The default in most software is too tight. Bump it to roughly 1.4 to 1.6 times the font size and your paragraphs will suddenly feel calmer. This single change does more for readability than switching fonts ever will. In Word it’s “line spacing.” In Google Docs it’s “line & paragraph spacing.” Find it. Use it.

Rule four: hierarchy is contrast, not ornament. When you want to show that something is important — a heading, a key sentence, a quote — your instinct will be to add bold, italic, underline, color, and a larger size, all at once. Don’t. Pick one. The strongest hierarchy comes from one clear difference, not five small ones. A heading that is just bigger and bolder than the body, with everything else equal, will read more cleanly than a heading that’s bigger, bolder, italic, blue, and underlined.

Rule five: alignment is a quiet superpower. Most amateur designs have invisible chaos in them: text that’s center-aligned for no reason, paragraphs starting at slightly different left edges, images floating without an anchor. The fix is brutally simple — pick a left edge for everything on the page, and make every block of text start at that edge. Suddenly the whole page calms down. This one rule fixes more bad slides than any font choice ever will.

These five rules won’t make you a designer. They’ll just keep you from looking like you’re not trying. That’s usually enough.