Choosing a font for personalised jewellery

Carved capitals, written letters

The first version of the Latin alphabet, the one this page is written in, had no lower case at all. Every letter was a capital. The small letters came later, and they grew out of handwriting, from the joined-up, cursive forms of the pen.

Choosing lettering for a name necklace is, in a small way, choosing between those two families. Capitals are upright, even and architectural. Lower case and script are softer and more personal, closer to the hand that signs a birthday card. Neither is right or wrong. But each behaves differently once it is shrunk to the size of a pendant and made in metal, and that is what this guide is about.

The four broad styles

Type designers sort typefaces into many detailed classes. For jewellery, four broad styles cover almost everything you will be offered.

• Script. Lettering that takes its cue from handwriting and calligraphy. Script typefaces are usually a little more formal than plain handwriting, and often decorated with flourishes called swashes.
• Serif. A serif is the small mark or line at the end of a letter's stroke. Serif typefaces tend to have more contrast between their thick and thin strokes than sans serifs do, which gives them a classic, bookish look.
• Sans serif. From the French "sans", meaning without: a typeface with no serifs. Sans serifs typically have lower contrast and a larger x-height, the height of the small letters, than serifs.
• Block capitals. Not a formal type class, but the word jewellers and customers tend to use for bold, heavy capitals, usually in a sans serif or a slab serif, whose serifs are as thick as the rest of the letter.

Lettering at small sizes

Typographers separate two ideas. Legibility is whether each letter can be recognised for what it is. Readability is how comfortable a whole passage is to read. A name necklace is only a word or two, so legibility is what counts.

Some typefaces are simply more legible than others. The classic test is whether a font gives clearly different shapes to the figure 1, the capital I and the lower case l, or to the figure 0, the capital O and the lower case o. In some typefaces they are almost identical. On a pendant, that is the difference between "Isla" and "lsla".

Size matters most of all. Type that is very small stops being legible, and in jewellery the letters are often small. Type designers who draw special versions of a typeface for small sizes give them three things: less contrast between thick and thin strokes, more open spacing between letters, and taller small letters. Those are useful clues when you are choosing for a small piece. A font with even strokes, open spacing and generous lower case letters is likely to stay clear when it is shrunk.

Why name necklaces join up

Many name necklaces are cut from a single flat sheet of metal, with the word itself forming the pendant. That simple fact shapes which fonts work. Every part of the name has to be connected to the rest. A letter that doesn't touch its neighbour would become a separate piece and fall away.

This is why joined-up script is the natural choice for cut-out names. In a script font, the letters of a word already link together, as they do in handwriting. In a serif or sans serif, the letters normally stand apart, so a cut-out version needs them to overlap, touch, or sit on a connecting bar.

Even in a script, a few parts usually float free:

• Dots on i and j, and accents such as the one in Zoë or José.
• Capitals, which in many script fonts don't connect to the letter after them.
• Swashes, the decorative flourishes. Type designers advise keeping them to the start or end of a word, because in the middle they tend to collide with neighbouring letters.

A designer can solve each of these: by attaching the dot to its letter, nudging a capital until it touches, or redrawing a flourish. It is worth asking how a design handles them, because the answer changes the look.

Thin strokes and everyday wear

Contrast, in lettering, means the difference between the thick and thin parts of each stroke. High-contrast fonts, including most elegant scripts and many serifs, have hairlines that are a fraction of the width of their thick strokes. Low-contrast fonts, sometimes called monolinear, keep the stroke about the same thickness all the way round.

On paper, a hairline is only ink. In a cut-out pendant it is metal, and it is usually the thinnest and most flexible part of the piece. A fine script can be beautiful, but if the necklace will be worn every day, slept in, or given to a child, a font with a sturdier, more even stroke is a sensible choice. It is the same instinct that makes people choose a thicker chain for everyday wear.

Bear in mind that a font which looks robust at full size gets thinner as it shrinks. Every stroke scales down with the letter, so a long name made small will have finer joins than the same font used for a short name.

Capitals or lower case

Typographers warn that text set entirely in capitals is hard to read unless it is very short, and suggest keeping it to titles and emphasis. A name is about as short as text gets, so all capitals is a perfectly good choice for jewellery. Two things are worth knowing:

• Capitals need a little air. At small sizes, capitals usually read better with slightly more space between the letters.
• Capitals take more room. In the diagram above, the same name in block capitals is the widest of the four. Lower case letters, with their ascenders and descenders rising and dipping, give a word a more distinctive outline, which can help it read at a glance.

A capital followed by lower case, the way a name is normally written, is the familiar middle path. In script fonts the capital is often the showpiece, so it is worth looking at your initial letter on its own before deciding.

How a font sets the mood

People react to lettering emotionally before they have read a word. Google's typography guide makes the point with an example borrowed from the designer Erik Spiekermann: most of us would trust a skydiving instructor whose sign is set in a sober sans serif, and would rather our egg seller's sign looked a little more casual.

A few associations are widely shared. Script tends to read as personal and romantic. Serif type feels classic, even literary. Sans serif feels modern and calm. Heavy capitals feel confident and bold. These are tendencies, not laws, and they shift with fashion: the same guide notes that calligraphic faces, which once looked very 1970s and '80s, are back in favour.

The type designer Matthew Carter put the deeper point neatly: "Type is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters." Look at the whole name, not just the capital you love. A font that makes one letter sing can make another look awkward.

Engraved or cut out

There are two broad ways to put a name on a piece of jewellery, and they make different demands on the font.

• Engraved. The letters are marked into the surface of a disc, bar, ring or tag. The piece holds itself together, so the letters don't need to join, and almost any style can work, including separate serif or sans serif letters and very small text. The limits are mostly about size and depth: the finest hairlines of a delicate script may be hard to make out once engraved small.
• Cut out. The letters are the piece. Everything in the section on joining up applies: letters must connect, loose dots and accents need a solution, and the thinnest stroke sets the strength of the whole pendant.

As a rule of thumb, if you love a font with separate letters or very fine strokes, engraving is often the kinder home for it. If you want the name itself to be the jewel, choose a font built to join.

The carved and the written

Every name necklace sits somewhere between the alphabet's two histories: the upright capitals that came first, and the joined-up hand that followed. Script carries the warmth of handwriting. Capitals carry the steadiness of something carved. Choose the one that sounds like the person who will wear it, then check it at its real size, because a font only becomes jewellery once it is small enough to wear.