10 ways to pair fonts for maximum impact

Font pairing recommendations made easy

Smart font choices can be the difference between someone resonating with, liking, and sharing your message or continuing to scroll through their feed. And as with complementary colors, certain fonts pair well together and can help enhance your message, solidify a brand, and establish hierarchy—an important design principle. Considering the sheer volume of fonts available, it can be easy to become overwhelmed.

Adobe Express includes 20,000 licensed fonts, was well as curated font recommendations for your use in your next project. The recommendations suggest which standalone font you should use, but also include suggestions for complementary fonts, font colors, and font effects to help you create unique designs. These recommendations are curated from fonts in Adobe Express templates, which are created by professional designers. The app also makes font recommendations based on contextual clues from context clues such as other fonts and design assets you’re using in your project.

While Adobe Express helps you determine font pairings directly in the app, this blog post explores some current font pairings to give you more information on the subject. Learn about the moods or messages that certain font pairings inspire. Each section includes notes on what the fonts communicate and suggestions for which industries the pairings work best.

Finally, we’ve included free Adobe Express templates that feature the font pairings we highlight in this post. Tap a template to remix and make your own. You can also play around in the template and see what other fonts Express suggests for you to use.

Funky headers and sans serif body

Grab your audience’s attention by pairing a funky or extravagant header font with sans serif fonts in the body of your design. San serif fonts are those without “serifs”, aka the line or pen stroke hanging from a letter. Sans serif fonts are clean and crisp. Hot tip: click on “More fonts” in the editor to see grouping of fonts by mood, style, and type.

Best used for: Event flyers, social media posts advertising restaurant or shop pop-ups, vintage stores

Examples of funky fonts:

• Birra
• Custard
• Funkydori
• Glodok
• Mythos
• Whomp

Examples of sans serif fonts:

• Basic Sans
• Brother
• PT Sans
• Open Sans
• Marine
• Neuzeit Grotesk

Bold and modern

Pairing bold and modern fonts works well to attract—and then keep—your audience’s attention. This font pairing works well for brands that need to stand out but also convey a sense of contemporary attitudes and products.

Best used For: Corporate communication, high-end stores, beauty brands, mod furniture stores, food brands, restaurants

Elegant

Pairing two elegant fonts elevates your content. This sense of refinement and class conveys quality and timelessness in your products and services. Elegant fonts are also pleasing to the eye and keep your customers engaged. An elegant font doesn’t necessarily mean it has to include cursive or mimic handwriting. Sans serif fonts can also convey crisp, simple, and direct elegance.

Best used for: Jewelry brands, boutique stores, high-end services or products, wedding and event invitations.

Decades collide

Fonts that inspire moods reminiscent of bygone decades (think 70s disco, 80s new wave, or 90s grunge) well with contemporary, readable fonts. The pairing of old- and new-looking fonts give your designs a retro edge while keeping them practical and current feeling.

Best used for: Music nights and events, school parties, thrift stores, fashion blogs and social media accounts.