What do you think about comics about using different fonts/colors for the speech bubbles of different characters?

I'm having trouble finding a comic is able to do so without looking cheap or cluttered. I guess it's best to stick to one font for dialogue?

Yes. You really should stick to one colour and one font.
Although, sometimes there are exceptions, like if you wanted a robotic or demonic voice maybe; but for your average character, it's best to keep to the one font and colour.

Eh, I don't think the answer is so across the board. I use different fonts for each character in mine. After a while, I started wondering if it was necessary so I introduced some characters and had them use the same font. The readers indicated pretty quickly they couldn't tell who was talking easily.

I don't use speech bubbles, so I can't speak for colors. I'd contrast to the background is most important. As most speech bubbles are filled white, black works just fine. Too many rainbowish colors on white becomes difficult to look at, either because it's just hard to read bright colors on white (ex. lime green) or it resembles a fruit salad nightmare.

I really don't like it when i see that, unless the character has a special voice (such as a spirit or a demonic voice, etc) It's just distracting.

I use different colours in my speech bubbles in Pinky TA and I fool myself that they look perfectly OK :)

Chernobog
Eh, I don't think the answer is so across the board.

Right on! :D

Like any experimentation with comics, there's going to be people who do it different in a bad way and in a good way. Oftentimes the bad outweighs the good, but because of this too many people decide not to try at all. I have found this is especially true with fonts. Nobody wants to try anything different because deviating from the norm is bad!

Of course, it's because it's easy to screw up too. Regardless, I see no point in discouraging people from trying something new just because it's "safe" to stick with what everyone else is doing.
My experience has been rather similar to Chernobog's, the readership is pretty positive about the font "voices" and have come to recognize whom each belongs to. They noticed when I changed a few speaking fonts that I felt weren't doing their job or didn't scale properly when necessary. I think it adds another dimension to the reading experience when it's done right. Why should everyone have to find one font that doesn't suck and then be beholden to it for the rest of their comic? To me that's like telling people they need to stick to one facial expression just because people often can't draw good facial expressions.

The biggest nuisance isn't using a font for different voices, but what fonts you use and WHY you use them. I've got about 95 characters, almost all have a different font/voice (3 exceptions for story reasons). For the most part, I use pretty subdued fonts so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, but I've made my share of mistakes too. Transparent balloons, balloons with colored stroke, balloons made with a brush, an unreadable font or two... all of them I fixed thanks to reader feedback. Only one person ever complained about the multiple fonts, and didn't have anything to say other than "it ruins the good art". It came off as more of a "I want to complain about something" comment, if you now what I mean, and my readers let me know that they liked the fonts in response to it. If they all said it was a problem however, it would really be something to consider!


What to consider regarding variety:

Readablity: Does the font scale well? Is it clear and crisp? Are all letters readable as what they are, or do certain letters jam up to others? People need to learn the difference between dialogue fonts, tile fonts and sound effect fonts. "Manga Speak" may make a good speaking font, "Twelve Ton Sushi" will come off as obnoxious!
I have a large library of fonts I downloaded, and I take care to never use sound-effect or title fonts for speech. I had one character speak with a title font for a long time,(Felix Titling) but eventually gave him something a little more suitable to his current state of mind. The problem with Felix was it was hard to tell the Y and T apart at the size I wanted the dialogue, and more than a few ytpos resulted from it! lol!
Fonts with serifs and weird dangly parts, or too much space between leading are not good for speaking fonts. They tangle everything up, are distracting, and take up too much room in the space for dialogue.
Something sterile and boring on the other hand, is about as bad. A Fantasy Adventure, in Microsoft Sans Serif!

Consistency: Making sure the size is consistent throughout, especially with multiple dialogues on a page. Some fonts will look larger than others, so trying to make sure they stay at an even level with each other will do a lot to keep the differences in the fonts to a minimum.

Theme/personality: With a "font per character" style, make sure the font you choose is not only legible but fits the character. And when you find one, stick with it! Giving a character a font that looks like it's shouting all the time is probably not a good idea, unless your character is indeed obnoxious all the time. I always recommend avoiding all-caps fonts for this very reason, however. People love Digital Strip for some reason, but I find the lack of capitalized letters annoying.

Color: Save colors for intonations, don't slap it everywhere without a thought. Just for example, red font is usually read as an "angry" bloodthirsty voice, and you don't want people thinking that in a situation that doesn't call for it! Besides that, red is notoriously harsh on the eyes depending on what backdrop it's against.
Colors aren't really necessary in a comic that's full-color. It's used mostly for sprite comics where the characters are too small or other factors prevent the artist from making proper word balloons.
However, it can be done pretty nicely like in the case of Ozone's comic :D
It's nice to add a touch of color when your comic is nearly greyscale or very bleak and desaturated. Color font in a color comic makes the font sort of blend into the background too much. Also avoid transparent balloons for this reason, colors will bleed into it too much and it makes it harder to read the font. You might as well just apply a stroke to the font if your concern is covering art.

I have some guidelines on lettering and fonts in my DD forum.

None of it should be treated as Gospel, obviously. You need to decide for yourself what works best for your comic. Even so, before making that decision, this might at least give you some idea of the areas you should probably be thinking about.

Amelius
A lot

Some really goos points there. Actually a lot of them. Personally I'm not too good with this stuff but I think it is down to the execution. Do it well and it's a nice stylistic choice which adds to the presentation. Get it wrong and it's a distraction.

For the lite bites reviews I use colour coded speech bubbles to assist with the text heavy conversations that have multiple people giving opinions.

Amelius must be absolutely bonkers using that many fonts though. You must spend more time doing that than colouring the pages.

@DAJB a very good article for newbies... well even some of use who aren't so new can learn something from that.

I don't have too much to add, because I'm not a master of speech bubbles, but:

When I look at other comics, I like it when the fonts and speech bubbles match the "attitude" of the comic; it's a little silly when a "serious" comic has all these fonts going on, even if they do fit. Comics with a more relaxed attitude can get away with it more easily I think but it needs to be done really carefully. I hate when there are so many colors and fonts going on that I can barely read what the characters are saying. Even if you do this "well", you are bound to have pages where the fonts and colors clash for some people anyway.

As for fonts/colors/bubbles and character personality...eh, I don't like connecting those two. I feel that if you change the fonts and colors to add personality, you may be using it as a crutch to your writing; instead of establishing a solid personality for your character, you change the fonts and colors. Do I make any sense...? I don't know, for example, if a character has been characterized well and shows progression, the reader gets to "know" them and in turn should know when they're being sarcastic, ect. without a font/color change.

The only time I don't mind it is for onomatopoeia or if the person is screaming or something :/ but then again, I just may be too conservative xD

Amelius

Chernobog
Eh, I don't think the answer is so across the board.

Right on! :D

Like any experimentation with comics, there's going to be people who do it different in a bad way and in a good way. Oftentimes the bad outweighs the good, but because of this too many people decide not to try at all. I have found this is especially true with fonts. Nobody wants to try anything different because deviating from the norm is bad!

Of course, it's because it's easy to screw up too. Regardless, I see no point in discouraging people from trying something new just because it's "safe" to stick with what everyone else is doing.
My experience has been rather similar to Chernobog's, the readership is pretty positive about the font "voices" and have come to recognize whom each belongs to. They noticed when I changed a few speaking fonts that I felt weren't doing their job or didn't scale properly when necessary. I think it adds another dimension to the reading experience when it's done right. Why should everyone have to find one font that doesn't suck and then be beholden to it for the rest of their comic? To me that's like telling people they need to stick to one facial expression just because people often can't draw good facial expressions.

The biggest nuisance isn't using a font for different voices, but what fonts you use and WHY you use them. I've got about 95 characters, almost all have a different font/voice (3 exceptions for story reasons). For the most part, I use pretty subdued fonts so it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, but I've made my share of mistakes too. Transparent balloons, balloons with colored stroke, balloons made with a brush, an unreadable font or two... all of them I fixed thanks to reader feedback. Only one person ever complained about the multiple fonts, and didn't have anything to say other than "it ruins the good art". It came off as more of a "I want to complain about something" comment, if you now what I mean, and my readers let me know that they liked the fonts in response to it. If they all said it was a problem however, it would really be something to consider!

IMO you readership should not need fonts to know who is speaking though, like i understand if they got used to it and you suddenly change the font(since i notice that on comics i read using a single font) but i think it should be obvious who the word bubble is coming regardless of text. It's just...the comic artists job to convey those things.

I like your point on whats "safe", but i've yet to see a comic use a bunch of different fonts for characters that didn't distract me unreasonably. It almost seems gimmicky too. Also a disclaimer that i'm not attacking you or your comic, just giving my personal gripes with seeing this in comics.

And you'd think this would have a name? Fonty bubbles BD

Haha, fonty bubbles! lol!

I agree, people should know who's talking without needing a different font, and I make sure they do. That's what the tails on the bubbles are for! :D (as well as proper placement on the panel, it drives me nuts when people get that wrong!) I'm not doing this as a gimmick or a crutch for lack of ability to convey who's speaking or their personality though, I just added the extra layer of "voice" as a personal choice. No one else was doing it at the time I started, later on though I did read about another webcomic that used fonts the same way and the reviewer was gushing like this was the greatest and most original thing ever :/

People once denounced "sound" as a gimmick when it was first added to movies, and then color, and then Stereo, and now 3d. It's only a gimmick if you use it as such, and like all of these can be done to disastrous effect. But each of these CAN add a lot to a movie, giving it depth, cues and atmosphere. We'd have never learned to use the music sting to the right effect if someone had told the orchestra "don't do that, it's too distracting".

I really feel it's whether or not the different fonts have a real purpose in being different. For just one example, I had a character assume another character's appearance but he forgot to adjust his voice, so I had his real font coming out of what appeared to be the other character. The real character's friend asked what was up with his voice, and after that the font changed to "proper" font for the disguise. A joke like that really falls flat without the different fonts, and I try to use it to that effect a lot. If I changed it to one font for everyone, it would please no one in my readership but would make me look "professional" in the eyes of people who won't read my comic anyway. In the end, who am I really trying to please? :D

Genejoke
Amelius must be absolutely bonkers using that many fonts though. You must spend more time doing that than colouring the pages.

I am pretty bonkers, but the fonts don't take terribly long at all! There's typically only a handful of characters on a page, and they aren't all saying things. Their voice is something I attribute to them as much as any other minor detail like horns, tails, pupil shape and scars. Forgetting their font would be like forgetting any of those!
The only problem I've run into was losing a bunch of fonts when my computer had to be wiped due to a virus, and not remembering the name of a font I used for a character that was minor at the time... so I decided to save myself future pain and made a list!

Amelius
People once denounced "sound" as a gimmick when it was first added to movies, and then color, and then Stereo, and now 3d. It's only a gimmick if you use it as such, and like all of these can be done to disastrous effect. But each of these CAN add a lot to a movie, giving it depth, cues and atmosphere. We'd have never learned to use the music sting to the right effect if someone had told the orchestra "don't do that, it's too distracting".

Huh that is a very interesting way to see it! :) You've sold me on people using different fonts, i think i may try doing it myself some day if it fits with the comic.

eli perez
What do you think about comics about using different fonts/colors for the speech bubbles of different characters?

I'm having trouble finding a comic is able to do so without looking cheap or cluttered. I guess it's best to stick to one font for dialogue?

A lot of times when someone uses multi-colored speech bubbles, it's going to look cluttered, but not because of the colored bubbles. It's a technique artists use when they have too much dense dialogue in a panel, to make it easier to tell who's saying what. So they've already lost the battle against clutter, and the color-coding serves more a functional than an aesthetic role.

El Cid
multi-colored speech bubbles

That's true for some.

I use coloured bubbles for a couple of reasons-
- White is the brightest colour you can have in a comic, so I don't want to waste the effect of its use on text backgrounds.
- I use colours to help indicate and enhance mood.
- Identify with characters.

I think of them a little like signature tunes or character themes (musical) in TV shows and films and things. And it's like Amy says; another effect to take advantage of.