10 Common Mistakes in Font Design and How to Avoid Them
Creating a font is both an art and a science. It’s exciting to watch your letters come to life, but also challenging to maintain precision, consistency, and balance. Many new type designers, and even experienced ones, fall into subtle mistakes that make a font look unprofessional or hard to use.
In this article, we’ll explore the most common mistakes in font design — from poor spacing to inconsistent stroke weights — and how to fix them. Whether you’re creating your first font or refining your professional typeface collection, these insights will help you produce cleaner, more commercial-ready designs.
1. Ignoring Consistency Across Glyphs
Every font needs visual harmony. The biggest rookie mistake is creating each letter individually without comparing it to others. This often leads to inconsistent proportions — some letters look too wide, others too tall, and the whole typeface feels “off.”
How to fix it: Use guides and a grid system. Check your letters side by side. Pay attention to rhythm, contrast, and weight consistency. For example, the stroke thickness in “H” should visually match “E” and “N.”
2. Poor Spacing and Kerning
Spacing and kerning can make or break a font. Even the most beautifully drawn letters will look awkward if the spacing between them is uneven. Beginners often forget to balance the white space between characters, leading to inconsistent rhythm when words are typed.
Tip: Always test your font with real words and sentences. Use phrases like “Hamburgerfontsiv” or “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” These reveal spacing issues clearly. Remember: good spacing is not about perfect math, it’s about visual balance.
3. Incorrect Overshoot and Optical Adjustment
Rounded letters like “O” or “C” appear smaller than flat ones like “H” if they share the same height. This happens due to an optical illusion. Many beginners forget to adjust this by adding slight overshoots — small extensions beyond the baseline or cap height — to maintain visual balance.
Fix: Allow rounded shapes to extend slightly above or below guides. Your “O” should overshoot a little, so it looks the same size as your “H.”
4. Uneven Stroke Weight and Contrast
Inconsistent stroke contrast makes fonts look unrefined. The thick and thin parts of letters must follow a logical pattern, depending on your chosen style (transitional, modern, geometric, etc.). If your “a” is thin and elegant but your “n” is thick and clumsy, it breaks harmony.
How to fix: Decide your contrast direction (diagonal or vertical) early. Use consistent pressure and angles. If you’re using Bézier curves, ensure your handles are balanced and symmetrical.
5. Overusing Auto-Tracing or Font Conversion Tools
Some designers use vector auto-trace tools to convert lettering into fonts quickly. While tempting, this often creates messy nodes, uneven curves, and jagged outlines. The result? A font that looks amateurish and prints poorly.
Better approach: Manually refine every curve. Keep your nodes minimal — use only the anchor points you need. Clean vector paths are smoother, more consistent, and lighter in file size.
6. Bad Glyph Alignment and Metrics
When exporting a font, poor alignment ruins the user experience. For example, if the “i” and “l” don’t align with the baseline properly, or punctuation floats too high, your text will look uneven. Misaligned metrics make the font frustrating for typographers to use.
Solution: Check your baseline, x-height, and cap height for all glyphs. Use the metrics panel in your font editor (like Glyphs, FontLab, or FontForge). Consistency is key.
7. Lack of Character Set Planning
Another common mistake is creating only basic A–Z letters and forgetting additional glyphs like punctuation, numbers, accents, or symbols. Without them, your font feels incomplete and unusable in real-world design projects.
Tip: Plan your character set before drawing. Start with a full Latin set if you’re targeting global users. Include diacritics (á, é, ñ, ü), punctuation, and currency symbols ($, €, ¥). The more complete your font, the more professional it feels.
8. No Testing Across Sizes and Environments
A font might look great at 120pt but terrible at 12pt. Many designers only test at one scale. Similarly, your font could appear too dark on screen or too light in print.
Fix: Test at multiple sizes, from large headlines to small paragraphs. Print samples and view them on different devices. Adjust contrast, spacing, and weight for optimal legibility everywhere.
9. Copying Another Font Too Closely
Inspiration is fine — plagiarism is not. Some beginners copy the structure of existing fonts too directly, thinking it’s just “influence.” This can lead to legal issues and a lack of originality. Moreover, it prevents you from developing your unique design identity.
Advice: Study fonts to understand structure, but always redraw from scratch. Experiment with proportions, rhythm, and details that reflect your style.
10. Forgetting About Font Licensing and Naming
Many designers overlook the importance of naming and licensing. A generic name like “Modern Sans” can conflict with existing trademarks. Similarly, skipping the license file confuses buyers or users about how they can use your font.
How to fix: Choose a unique, memorable name — short and brandable. Always include a clear license text (like SIL Open Font License for free fonts, or a commercial EULA for paid ones). This builds professionalism and trust.
11. Not Using Proper Hinting or Export Settings
When a font looks blurry or uneven at small sizes, it’s often due to missing hinting — instructions that tell the computer how to render shapes on screen. Beginners often skip this step or export fonts with incorrect settings.
Tip: Use your font editor’s auto-hint feature, then test the result. Export in both OTF and TTF formats for compatibility. Proper hinting ensures crisp display on all platforms.
12. Overcomplicating the Design
Many new designers try to make fonts overly stylish — too many swashes, decorations, or inconsistent thickness. Simplicity often wins. A readable, balanced design works better commercially than a complex, inconsistent one.
Keep it simple: Focus on clarity, rhythm, and usability. Once your base shapes are solid, you can add decorative alternates later.
13. Not Paying Attention to Negative Space
Good typography is as much about the space between letters as the letters themselves. Beginners often focus only on the black forms (strokes and fills) but ignore the white spaces that shape readability and texture.
Practice: Flip your design in reverse colors (white letters on black) or blur it slightly — this helps you spot uneven spacing and shapes instantly.
14. Forgetting Testing in Real Words
A font should not only look beautiful in isolated letters — it must perform well in text. Some designers forget to test with actual words, phrases, and paragraphs before finalizing the design.
How to fix: Use pangrams and common phrases to preview your font. Look at rhythm, legibility, and balance across various letter combinations. Your font should “feel” comfortable in sentences.
15. Ignoring the Purpose and Target Audience
Not all fonts fit every purpose. A font meant for branding should have a distinct personality; a font for body text must focus on readability. Designing without understanding the use case often leads to mismatched results.
Ask yourself: Who will use this font? For logos? Posters? Books? Apps? Define its function early, and you’ll make better design choices for structure, contrast, and spacing.
The Essential
Designing a font is a journey — one that teaches patience, precision, and problem-solving. Every mistake helps you grow, but knowing the common pitfalls ahead of time saves countless hours of frustration.
By paying attention to consistency, spacing, alignment, and testing, you’ll create fonts that not only look beautiful but also perform perfectly in real-world design projects. Remember: the best fonts aren’t the most complex — they’re the most thoughtful.
