A guide to recognising font styles

Telling font styles apart was one of the hardest things to do when I started working as a designer. Being self-taught, the only major difference I could see was that a font was either a serif or a sans-serif. But the more I explored, the more I realised how vast the universe of font styles actually is.

This guide is an excerpt of chapter 3 from the book Better Web Typography for a Better Web by Matej Latin. The book consists of 13 chapters through which the reader designs and builds an example website and thus learns by doing.

Now I know why recognising the style of a font is so hard. When it comes to typography, and especially when it comes to typefaces, it’s all in the details. It’s hard to even imagine how much work goes into designing a typeface and how much focus type designers put into tiny details that remain invisible to most people. So to find the clues to tell font styles apart, we need to learn to see these details. But first, why would anyone want to be able to recognise font styles? Why not just choose and combine fonts based on our gut feeling?