Before you read a single word on a website, you've already formed an opinion. Not about the content. Not about the product. About the feeling. And that feeling - that instant, subconscious judgement - is shaped almost entirely by the typeface staring back at you. Typography is the handshake before the conversation. It sets the tone for everything that follows, and most people never even notice it happening.
I'm not a typographer. I'm not even a designer, really. I'm a strategy person who builds things and cares deeply about how they feel. But I've spent more time thinking about fonts than I have about almost any other design decision, because I've come to believe that your font choice says more about your product than your copy ever will.
Think about it. You land on a website set in Comic Sans and you immediately know something about the person who made it - whether that judgement is fair or not. You land on a site set in Helvetica Neue and you know something different. You land on a site set in a beautiful serif and you feel warmth, authority, consideration. The words have not changed. Only the vessel has. And yet the entire experience shifts.
The three-font system
Across every single thing I've built - fourteen products and counting - I use the same three fonts. DM Serif Display. Inter. Space Mono. That is it. Three typefaces for everything from a Japanese learning app to a London pub guide to a culture aggregator to this portfolio site you're reading right now.
This wasn't a lazy decision. It was a considered one. Each font plays a specific role, like casting actors in a film. DM Serif Display is the leading role - it brings warmth, authority, a sense that what you're reading matters. It's the headline font, the title font, the "pay attention" font. When you see DM Serif Display, you know this is important. It has personality without being showy. Gravitas without being stuffy.
Inter is the supporting role. Clean, readable, invisible in the best possible way. You never notice Inter doing its job, which is exactly the point. Body text shouldn't draw attention to itself. It should get out of the way and let the words do the work. Inter does that better than almost any sans-serif I have found. It's the font equivalent of a good film editor - you only notice them when they're bad.
Space Mono is the character actor. The one who shows up for small but crucial moments - metadata, labels, timestamps, navigation. It says "this is precise" and "this is technical" without being cold. It adds a layer of texture that stops everything from feeling too smooth, too corporate, too polished. A little grit. A little edge.
Font pairing is casting
The relationship between fonts matters as much as the fonts themselves. You wouldn't cast two leading actors who play the same energy. You need contrast. Tension. Harmony through difference.
DM Serif Display and Inter work together because they're opposites that complement. One is decorative, warm, expressive. The other is neutral, clean, functional. Together they create a rhythm - emphasis and clarity, importance and readability, personality and professionalism. Neither would work as well alone. Together they're better than the sum of their parts.
Space Mono sits underneath both, adding a third dimension. It's the typeface that whispers "someone thought about this." When you see monospaced text used for labels and metadata, it signals a certain kind of attention to detail. It says the person who made this cares about the craft, not just the content. That signal matters, especially when you're building a portfolio that needs to demonstrate taste.
Most people choose fonts last. They build the entire site, write all the copy, arrange all the layouts, and then scroll through Google Fonts looking for something that "looks nice." This is backwards. Designers choose fonts first, because the typeface informs every other decision. The font dictates the spacing. The spacing dictates the layout. The layout dictates the content structure. Start with the font and everything else follows.
Why consistency beats variety
There's a temptation, especially when you're building multiple products, to give each one its own typographic identity. A different font for each project. A unique visual language for every site. It sounds like good design thinking - each product should have its own personality, right?
Wrong. Or at least, wrong for what I'm trying to do. My products aren't separate entities that exist in isolation. They're a portfolio. A body of work. A collection that, taken together, says something about who made them. And what I want that collection to say is: this person has taste, this person is consistent, this person has thought about this.
Using the same three fonts across fourteen products creates a visual thread that ties everything together. You move from Little London to CultureTerminal to First Out and, even though the content is completely different, there's a familial resemblance. A shared DNA. You might not consciously notice it, but you feel it. It creates trust. It creates recognition. It creates the sense that one person with a clear point of view made all of this.
The big design systems understand this. Apple uses San Francisco everywhere. Google uses its own type family across products. Monocle - one of my design heroes - is obsessive about typographic consistency. These companies know that consistency isn't boring. Consistency is a signal. It says: we know what we're doing, and we do it on purpose.
The psychology nobody talks about
Colour psychology gets all the attention. Red means urgency. Blue means trust. Green means go. Everyone knows this. But font psychology is just as real and far less discussed. Serif fonts convey tradition, authority, reliability. Sans-serif fonts convey modernity, clarity, efficiency. Monospaced fonts convey precision, technicality, intentionality. These aren't arbitrary associations. They're baked into decades of cultural conditioning.
When a law firm uses a serif font, they're saying "we're established, trustworthy, serious." When a tech startup uses a geometric sans-serif, they're saying "we're modern, clean, forward-thinking." When a developer tool uses a monospaced font, they're saying "we understand your world." None of this is accidental. The font is doing heavy lifting before a single word of copy kicks in.
I chose DM Serif Display for my headlines because I wanted my work to feel considered. Not corporate-considered. Personally considered. The kind of consideration that comes from someone who cares about the details, who thinks about how things feel, who has taste. A geometric sans-serif headline would have said "I'm a tech person." A serif headline says "I'm a person who thinks about craft." That's the message I want to send.
Comic Sans offends because it signals a lack of care. It's the typographic equivalent of showing up to a meeting in pyjamas. Not because there's anything inherently wrong with pyjamas, but because it signals that you didn't think about the context. Helvetica reassures because it signals the opposite - someone made a deliberate, considered choice. Even if that choice was to be neutral, neutrality is itself a position.
Typography is identity. It's one of the very few design decisions that touches every single page, every single element, every single interaction. Your colour palette might shift between sections. Your layout might change between pages. But your typeface is always there, always speaking, always shaping how people feel about what they're reading. Choose it first. Choose it carefully. Choose it on purpose.
Three fonts. Fourteen products. One identity. That is the system. And it works because it was never about finding the perfect font. It was about finding three fonts that work together, that say what I want to say, and then having the discipline to use them everywhere. Consistency isn't the enemy of creativity. It's the foundation that makes creativity legible.
