Top 5 Fonts for Scrapbooking

Top 5 Scrapbooking Fonts

Fonts play such a prominent role in scrapbooking. By choosing your font for your journaling, titles, and embellishments, you can create a mood or tone for your project. An elegant swirling font could set off a wedding layout, and an adorable block font could be perfect for a baby album. Choosing your font can be as personal and as creative as choosing the colors, papers and embellishments. Why not consider the individual fonts as a part of the creative process when you’re pulling together all the other creative elements for your pages?

Here are a few tips about fonts to keep in mind. Windows operating systems recommend no more than 500 fonts installed at any one time. Font gurus may have tens of thousands of fonts, though. If you have over 500 fonts it is recommended that you keep a separate file for your fonts, and use a font manager program to install and uninstall them in and out of Windows (a free one can be found by searching for “the font thing”. Also, to use any specific font, you need only open your font folder where you store your fonts, double click on that font, leave it open in the tray (at the bottom of your screen), and then, as if by magic, it will appear as an option in your software applications (Word, Print Shop, etc.).

Also, if you start to collect fonts (and with the thousands and thousands of them available, many for free, on the internet, why not??), it’s a good idea to categorize and organize them as you unzip and store them. It can become overwhelming if you let your collection grow too large before doing this. A good font manager program (and many are free and available on the internet) will allow you to set up your own categories and entries for organizing your fonts. It is recommended that you store them as you would use them. For example, if you are doing a formal invitation, you would know to go to the “Formal” or “Elegant” fonts section of your font manager and choose from there. You can just imagine the hours it would take if you had to browse through thousands of fonts every time you were looking for ‘just the right font’! Please note that the following fonts are examples of the categories they represent – and that there are literally thousands of fonts out there that could fall into these categories.

#1 Elegant Fonts

There are so many elegant fonts, and they are perfect for titles and journaling for a wedding layout, a formal event, even heritage scrapbooking. Knowing how to categorize your fonts will help you save time later on, when you go searching for them! An elegant font, sometimes referred to as a ‘swirly’ font, will have long sweeping tails and elegant curls. Here are some examples:

# 2 Journaling Fonts

Many popular journaling fonts look like handwriting. Of course, when typed, these fonts spell out the words with perfect spacing and even penmanship. Only the most trained persons could do that! Some are script, others just appear to be a natural flow of someone’s personal writing style. Journaling fonts look great as the text of a story on a layout, and as the sentiment for a card. Oftentimes these “texts” are printed out, cropped, matted, and added back to the layout or are adhered to the middle of a card. Using fonts in this manner is an excellent way to add to your options. Text box designs are limitless, and there’s always a way to coordinate the text box with your project. Some popular journal fonts are:

#3 Baby and Children’s Fonts

There’s a very long list of baby and children’s fonts available. There are also so many fonts that are available as ‘dingbats’ – or fonts that are actually graphics put into TTF (true type font) format. These dingbats can be perfect for titles and names. Using ‘kid styled’ fonts for a baby or child’s layout will add to the personality and tone of your project. Examples of baby or children’s fonts:

#4 Boyish Fonts

If you ask about fonts, you’re bound to find lots and lots that are “girlyish.” The curvy, swirly, curly fonts are plentiful. And girls just seem drawn to these wonderful fonts. But what if you are scrapping a masculine subject – a baby boy, or a young slugger? There are a lot of fonts that will go perfectly with such a project, and you can see the problem, can you not? Using a real girly font for a young man’s page wouldn’t seem appropriate. So what do you use, if you don’t want the standard computer fonts (Arial, New Times Roman, etc)? There are some real good choices, here are some favorites:

#5 Holiday Fonts

This category has so much to offer that your mind will boggle with the possibilities. Let’s look at the dingbats in this section as well. From graceful to traditional Christmas fonts; from Easter to birthday dingbats – this category will let you see the usefulness of fonts and dingbats in a whole new light. Adding these to your layouts, cards, and altered art projects will exponentially expand your options! Let’s take a look:

~Barbara Eastwick has been a professional crafter for over 2 decades.  Her passion for paper crafting has led her into the world of Scrapbooking and Card Making.  Come into her world and visit her work on the Kreate-A-Lope.com Blog.  She also writes information articles and tutorials for ScrapWOW.com.