I chose to play three typography games to practice my font-choosing skillz.
1) Type War:
I think I literally always choose in between five fonts for all of my assignments. When I find one that I like, I usually stick with it. Type War makes you pick the right one out of two, sometimes very similar fonts. By the end (and I played until level 10), I had learned a couple of new fonts, for example Didot, a classy, no-fuzz, yet pretty font that I would love to use on my website! And my longest streak was 78, I broke it right before the end and let me tell you – I was devastated.
2) Type Connection:
In the past I’ve always had trouble picking two or more fonts that go well together and contrast each other at the same without clashing. I’m also not really a fan of the Futura-style, simple, but annoying to look at fonts that I need to balance my big, curvy headlines, so I was really curious what kind of simple fonts this website had in store for me. It lets you pair two types of fonts and explains you why it is a “love story” or why not. The first pairing I made was a complete fail. Both fonts were too similar. The second time I was more lucky, and in that pairing I actually liked Futura a lot! I also loved the explanations on the side, why the fonts go together as well as they do and what is the science behind it.
3) Kern Typ:
Ever wondered why some typed words and titles are super soothing to look at? It might be because of how they are spaced. Really, the empty space in between two letters makes just as much of a difference than the letters themselves. I tried it out with this game. Spacing a word correctly without moving the first and last letter is much harder than I thought! Sometimes it’s so hard to estimate the distance. Do you measure from the center of the letter or the widest points? What about letters that are imbalanced, like a small ‘r’? I played the game twice just to get the hang of it but there are hundreds of possibilities to space the letters right. Sometimes I thought I was pretty close but then the site told me I was way off from what the specialists deem right. That was a really weird feeling.
