About Kingthings

Typography is one of the most quietly powerful parts of design, and one of the most underappreciated. It's easy to think of a font as just a way of arranging letters on a page. In practice, the typeface behind a piece of text does real, measurable work: it shapes a brand's personality, changes how trustworthy a message feels, and colours the reader's mood before they've consciously registered a single word.

Fonts change how people feel, not just how text looks

This isn't just a design opinion. Researchers Kevin Larson at Microsoft and Rosalind Picard at MIT found that people reading the same text set in a higher-quality typeface went on to solve a creative problem-solving task measurably better than people reading it in a plainer one, and frowned less while reading it, even though the words themselves never changed. Typography researcher Sarah Hyndman has taken that idea further in her work on multisensory type, showing that the same word set in different fonts can shift how people describe its taste, weight, or personality. A font isn't neutral packaging around a message. It's part of the message.

Brands find this out the hard way

You don't have to take a researcher's word for it. Watch what happens whenever a familiar brand changes its typeface: the reaction is rarely quiet. Gap's 2010 logo redesign, which swapped its distinctive custom serif-adjacent mark for a plain generic sans-serif, drew such a fast, loud public backlash that the company reversed the change within a week. Tropicana's 2009 packaging redesign, which altered its typography and imagery together, saw sales drop sharply enough that the original design returned within months. People often can't name the font that changed. They can absolutely feel that something did.

What we're trying to do here

Kingthings exists because most typography writing sits at one of two extremes: dense academic type-design theory, or shallow listicles that never explain why anything works the way it does. We're trying to sit in the middle: plain-English guides that still respect the reader enough to explain the real mechanics behind a font choice, written by people who genuinely care about letterforms rather than treating them as filler content.

Everything here is free to read, with no signup and nothing gated behind a paywall. If you want to see the ideas above in action rather than just read about them, our Type Tester lets you try your own words in nine real typefaces, and our guide to font types is the best place to start if you're new here.

Kingthings itself started as a font foundry, not a publication. Before any of these guides existed, this domain was where the Kingthings font family, gothic, decorative, serif and sans-serif faces still downloaded today, first went out into the world. Have a look at the full Kingthings font family if you're curious where the name comes from.