Picking the Best Fonts for Newsletters

When someone receives your newsletter, they decide almost instantly if they will read it or not. A large part of that decision is based on how legible the newsletter is: if a newsletter looks like it's going to be hard to read, more people will skip it. Picking an easy-to-read font can make a difference in who chooses to read your mailing. A good font is clear, without ornamentation. While fun fonts, like those that look like handwriting, may seem like they'll add a special touch to a newsletter, they can actually detract. A better option is to use a simple text font — it may not seem quite as attractive, but legibility is more important.

Your newsletter can use multiple fonts to make it easier for your readers to tell the difference between different parts of the newsletter. While you should use the same font throughout the newsletter for setting articles, you could use a different version of that font — or another font entirely for headlines or text boxes. Those changes can create visual interest in your newsletter, even if you don't have a lot of photographs or illustrations. If you can find typefaces that are closely connected, such as a serif font and a similar sans serif, you can still maintain a continuing sense of style throughout the newsletter.

If you're choosing fonts for the first time, it's important to see how those fonts actually look in print. Some may seem bigger on paper than on the computer screen, while others might be harder to read than you'd expect. It's important to see how your newsletter looks on paper before you finalize it because of the differences that you can see in typefaces that might look just right on the computer. The ability to zoom in and out on a page can be one of the biggest problems. It's very hard to tell just how big a font will actually appear on the page just by seeing how large your desktop publishing program is displaying it.