Change the Typeface Without Touching a Stylesheet
There is now a font setting on every design: a curated set of pairings, each one a heading face and a body face that are known to work together.
Pairings rather than individual fonts
Choosing two typefaces that get along is a genuine skill and the failure mode is ugly in a way that is hard to diagnose. So the picker offers pairs that have been tested together at the sizes the designs actually use.
You choose a pairing, not a heading font and separately a body font. That removes about ninety percent of the ways this goes wrong.
What is in the set
- Two classical serif pairings. Best for theater and period work. They read as literary and they set long bios well.
- Three modern sans pairings. Neutral, contemporary, safe. What most screen actors should pick.
- One high-contrast display pairing. A dramatic heading face with a plain body. Striking, and only right if your material can carry it.
- One monospace-accented pairing. Technical and slightly cold. Suits writers, directors and people whose work is not primarily performance.
What is not in the set, and why
Script and handwriting faces. They are unreadable at body size, they fail on some devices, and on an actor site they read as informal in a context where informality does not help. If you want warmth, get it from your photographs, not your typeface.
Also absent: any face where a capital I and a lowercase l are identical. That sounds pedantic until somebody mistypes your name.
Size and spacing come with it
Each pairing carries its own line height and sizing rather than being dropped into fixed values. A serif at the size a sans wants to be looks cramped, and this is why hand-swapped fonts usually look slightly wrong even when the face is a good one.
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Fonts are served from our own delivery, covered in web fonts served from a CDN, and only the weights a design actually uses are downloaded. Text is visible immediately with a fallback rather than the page sitting blank while a font arrives.
Related
Color schemes, background textures and layout width are the other three settings that make a template feel like yours without any code. If none of them go far enough, see custom CSS.
Create your free actor website and try two pairings against your bio.
