Which font for headings

Designers seem more willing to experiment with their headings than with the main body. If you want to bring some typographic variation into your next design, headings may be the easiest place to start. We were curious to learn the extent to which designers were willing to experiment with dark background colors. We looked out for any typography-oriented websites that had a dark color scheme and were surprised to find not a single one.

Pure white background for body copy won by a landslide. However, many of the designs avoid the high contrast of pure white on pure black; text color is often made a bit lighter than pure black. Designers clearly focus on legibility and avoid experimenting with background colors. The contrast of black on white is easy to read and is, at least among these websites, the status quo. Of course, the choice of headline font size depends on the font used in the design.

In any case, in our study by far the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices. The average font size for headings is But note that any size between 18 and 29 pixels could be effective; it depends, after all, on how your headings fit the overall design of your website.

Still, you could try experimenting with larger sizes, because displays are always getting larger, as are display resolutions. An obvious outlier is Wilson Miner screenshot below , who uses a massive font size of 48 pixels for his headlines.

His website is a special case, though, because all of his posts have extremely short titles, only a few words. Do you remember about seven years ago when Web designs had tiny, barely readable elements, and body copy was set to 8 pixels in Tahoma?

Small font sizes are out, and more and more modern designers are turning to large font sizes. From our sample size, we saw a clear tendency towards sizes between 12 and 14 pixels.

Overall, the average font size for body copy is 13 pixels. We noted as one would expect more and more attention being paid to the smallest typographic details. Dashes, quotes, footnotes, author names, introductory text and paragraphs have been carefully set, with optimal legibility in mind. Type setting is usually very consistent, with a lot of white space, leading and padding. Typographica uses a large font size for the introductory paragraphs of its articles, and then reverts to a normal size for the rest of text.

The overall value, then, is 1. This means that when you have chosen a font size for your body copy, you may want to multiply it by 2 to get your heading font size. Another option is to use a traditional scale 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72 or the Fibonacci sequence e. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

Steve S Steve S 1, 10 10 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. Whenever I see the word "Always" in a question like this, I sigh deeply and roll my eyes. JanC JanC 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges. I think waiwai will still make the headings bold, underlined, etc A font is one style in a type family But even if you take it broader, a normal "bold" or demibold as you would use in body text often isn't heavy enough for titles at bigger point sizes.

Technically Jan is correct about a bold face being a separate font, but I disagree about medium weight being too light for titles. If text is sufficiently large, a medium face may be preferable -- the text already draws your attention by its size, and typically a bold face will enhance neither readability nor visual appeal in that context. That said, you probably do want to use a display face instead of a text face.

Well, yeah, it all depends on the design e. Consider the following: If you want to the handbook to be official and "professional" oriented, I'd stick with the same font. If the mood is a bit lighter, then you can probably go ahead and use different fonts. Also consider whether the handbook might be viewed on the web - in that case, make sure to pick a supported font across all browsers. Some of the text including the heading might be copied and pasted into another place I'm not sure, but I have a feeling that if you use the same font, you'll get less surprises.

Dan Barak Dan Barak 7, 1 1 gold badge 26 26 silver badges 30 30 bronze badges. So you are saying that MS Office is doing wrong by using two different font types each for header and body and not giving a professional looking? Ed Ropple Ed Ropple 1 1 bronze badge. So generally, for me it boils down to legibility and a smidgen of taste.

Rahul Rahul RussellUresti RussellUresti 3 3 silver badges 5 5 bronze badges. Jared Harley Jared Harley 2 2 silver badges 7 7 bronze badges.

You may achieve this by any means you like: by keeping the font size of the heading and body same and playing with the font weight and style like italicizing text ; or by using different fonts for heading and body There is no hard-and-fast rule that dictates the use of the same font for heading and body text. Vikram Deshmukh Vikram Deshmukh 1 1 gold badge 5 5 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.

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