Branding: How to Choose the Right Font for Your Brand

This branding mini-series will help you understand the fundamental elements needed for creating a strong visual brand, along with the most up to date advice and tips for getting it right for your business. This week, it’s all about fonts.

 

 

Brief Introduction 

Do you have a favourite font? Many people do.

 

Fonts are about more than words, they’re an important part of your brand’s visual identity. They give your brand a voice and evoke emotional responses in people.

 

From the widespread dislike of the classic nineties Comic Sans that makes people cringe, to the elegance of Didot, fonts can say a lot about your brand’s personality. They even follow design trends and have entire research articles dedicated to them.

 

As a business owner, here are some of the things you need to know about choosing a font style for your business.

 

 

How fonts impact your business

Whether it’s for print, packaging, logo design or your website it’s important to choose the right typeface.

 

Just like colours have a psychological effect, fonts do too. They have an important role in driving the purpose of your design and provoking a reaction in your audience.

 

Some fonts are playful and fun, while others are serious or timeless. If your business is involved in managing people’s finances, you need to make sure that it is ‘sensible’. But within this overarching umbrella theme, you can drill down a bit and portray your business as modern or traditional through careful design choices.

 

 

How to choose a font for your brand

There’s no doubt that the type of font you use can help perfect your brand identity, but the process of choosing the right one can seem overwhelming. 

 

Fonts need to:

  1. Be readable – there’s no point in having a great message it’s not legible
  2. Compliment your brand identity – it should look good with your logo and on your website
  3. Work on every platform
  4. Convey the right character – you might want to look modern, fun, or refined

 

 

There are different types of font families, each bringing something different to a design:

  • Serif fonts are a classic font type, the most popular being Time New Roman. A ‘serif’ is a small decorative line at the end of a letter. They tend to look elegant and classy and work well in long paragraphs of text such as books and brochures because they’re easy for our eyes to recognise and read easily. 

 

  • Sans serif simply means ‘without serif’ in French. So any typeface where the letters don’t have the decorative line is a Sans Serif font. Sans Serif fonts have great legibility and are very easy to read. Websites tend to use this font style because they have a very clean, modern look. 

 

  • Script fonts have evolved in recent years. They are a more instinctive style of font that resembles handwriting, with a cursive appearance. Script fonts are great for adding a unique aesthetic to your branding but need to be used with care. 

  

  • Display fonts are highly decorative and stylised. They definitely have a place in certain locations, like headers or logos. But too much and you could put people off.

 

Once you’ve picked a font family, you need to think about lots of other things, like weights and styles. Even the thickness of the line can make a big difference to the overall appearance. 

With so many things to think about, getting a designer to create a font that’s right for your business will save a lot of time and money. But if you want to download a font from an online store, you’ll need to remember to purchase a font licence before you use it!

 

 

Tips from a designer:

Don’t try to be too trendy as you want your font styles to be future proof.

Calibri doesn’t make you quirky.

 

  

 

If you’d like help harnessing the power of colour to boost your brand, get in touch!