Fonts
purpose
Choosing fonts is a small, but important, step in building your brand. Why?
- Different font styles can evoke emotions and impact the ‘feel’ and ‘personality’ of your overall branding (e.g. quicky font for a quirky brand vs plain and simple for corporate).
- Different font types (serif, sans serif, or display) have specific purposes for their intended use which should be considered when selecting your overall brand fonts.
How Fonts Convey Brand Personality
OBJECTIVE
Fonts are used for your logo as well as all of your visual designs and communications.
The intention is to choose fonts that are not only visually appealing to your eye, but also reflect your brand’s values (e.g. traditional, fun, formal etc.) which also aid in attracting the right kind of customers.
You also want to choose a variey of fonts that will allow you to arrange text in an engaging, interesting and legible way that gets the message across most appropriately.
Similarly to colours, it is important to choose enough fonts that allow you to have options (so you dont keep picking random fonts for random designs), whilst making sure they look cohesive and well thought out as a whole.
In addition to choosing the fonts themselves you also need to consider the overall typography with any preferred layout, spacing, sizes, hierarchy, colour and integration of type across a variety of mediums. This is what helps to bring consistency across your branding as a while so that your designs can be easily recognised as belonging to you.
Process
There are literally thousands of font types and even more potential combinations you can choose from. The best, professionally designed fonts come with various weights and styles to form a complete family, along with carefully considered kerning pairs, multi-language support for international characters and expressive alternate glyphs to add character and variety to typesetting.
If all the type in a layout looks the same, it can be difficult to know which is the most important information, or what to read first. Size is one key way through which typographers create hierarchy and guide their readers. Headings are usually large, sub-headings are smaller, and body type is smaller still. But size isn’t the only way to define hierarchy; it can also be achieved with font type, colour, spacing and weight.
Here are some key things to consider which can help narrow down your options.
- Free font vs Licensed font
- What platforms do you need to use the font on.
Depending on where and how you will be using your font it may be safer to choose a commercial / royalty free font that has no restrictions on use. For example, if you plan to use your logo on merchandise you will be selling you may have certain limitations if you use a font without buying a certain license (which can be hundreds of dollars). In saying that, if that limits your choices to only fonts you don’t feel connected to then it may be worth sourcing a creative font from a font designer and paying for the appropriate license.
Another consideration is making sure the font you choose is accessible across all platforms, devices and software you will need. Things you may not know are imporant such as, can you upload it to your website and will it be able to be preloaded by third party users or will it default to a non-brand font? Is it free on Canva or will you need to purchase a pro plan and if so can you afford that?