Graphic Design 101: How Many Fonts Is Too Many?

How many fonts is too many? Three? Four? Ten? And is there somehow such thing as too few?

To answer the first question: a commonly used limit in terms of how many fonts that can be used in a singular piece or set of works is three fonts at most but usually only two, and no more.

To answer the second question: there's no such thing as too few unless there is supposed to be writing or some kind of information being shared in a piece and you or someone else just left it out entirely, making the total number of fonts zero.

But jokes aside, it's important to understand precisely why we should only use a maximum of three fonts, but more often only two. If you use too many fonts, you can run into two very common problems:

1. The fonts do not look good together on the page or screen, causing the entire image to be less visually appealing.
2. The multiple fonts will take away from the quality of the design and the visual appeal of the piece by being too distracting. Instead of taking in the information being presented to them in your piece, your audience may instead be distracted by how many different fonts you used in it.

Here are some examples of excessive font usage:

Image credit: Christian Jones

You might not know it by looking at these two images, but these were meant to be two small parts of a multi-part cyber security campaign. However because of the multiple different fonts used, the two pieces don't look like they are part of the same campaign much at all, let alone like they were created by the same person when they were.

Here is an example of good font usage:

Image credit: Allposters.com

You might be looking at this image and be thinking that this is an example of excessive font use because it looks almost as though multiple fonts are being used. However if you look closely, there is actually only two fonts being used here, with variations on both to make the design more lively and interesting without being over-the-top.

This music poster is a perfect example of a couple of a few other good design practices when using fonts:

1. If you are going to use more than one font, make sure that they are visually different from one another, such as one having serifs and the other being sans-serif. They can also be both serifed or sans-serif as long as they still look relatively distinct from one another.
2. If you find yourself itching to use more than two or three fonts, there are a variety of options to enhance your design without cluttering it with an excess of fonts:
• Use fonts that have a variety of weights, heights, and widths to them. These can allow you to have some variation in the appearance of your type but because the variations of a singular font are all based on the same core design values of one another, they can still coordinate very well while still looking different from one another.
• Play with color to emphasize differences in type. Having an accent color of sorts within an otherwise muted or neutral design can allow certain parts of it to stand out from the rest, and this concept can be easily applied to fonts as well to make things like titles, keywords, etc. stand out from the rest.
• Play with different sizes within a body of text. While you shouldn't go crazy with various text sizes in a piece, especially if it's something like a flyer, website, or handout where it could just be distracting and confusing, using different sizes can be a great way to put emphasis on certain words and phrases as well as take up potentially empty and dead space in a piece.

Lastly, another good practice when working in graphic design is to have specific purposes for each of the fonts you intend to use. This means having one font (and often one size) for titles, subtitles, body text, headers, footers, etc. so that the entire design - regardless of contents or how many pieces there are - remains visually consistent.