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Here is why fonts are important to consider for your brand:
- Your choice of font will appear on everything. Your brochures, your website, your signage, you may even have them featured prominently as part of your logo. Because they are ubiquitous a poor choice could be hurting you for a long time to come.
- They convey information. You don’t have to be a typologist to realise that this poster design by Leo Sousa for a roller derby competition wouldn’t work in Times New Roman. The handwritten poster-marker font has been used to convey the raw, gritty excitement of the event itself.
- Or that Ambrosia Standard, the font used on this award-winning restaurant’s website looks both playful and elegant. Two qualities that they want their customer to experience while dining. I mean – just look at that “K”.
Your choice of font says something about your brand and your brand values to your customers. Even if they aren’t an aesthetic connoisseur or can’t fully articulate exactly what they like or dislike, they will have a subtle but important emotional reaction to the font you choose.
“That’s all well and good. But how do I know what font to use? They all look pretty much the same to me.”
People who aren’t design nerds.
Here are 3 rules-of-thumb you can use to pick a font that probably doesn’t suck.
1 – Limit Your Choices to Webfonts
Webfonts are fonts that you can use on your website, without your customers needing to independently install files onto their computers/phones. By picking a Webfont, you can make sure that anything you design for print will also look the same on a screen.
There are millions of Webfonts out there; far too many to go through in a lifetime, so you need to narrow the field. Start by looking at a Webfont collection like Google Fonts. They are all completely free to use
2 – Pick something with several font weights.
Fonts need to be able to work as headings, body text, fine print, everything. So by picking something with a few different weights. As a minimum, find something with a light/thin, regular, and bold. This way you are making sure you’re covered for all situations.
There is an added benefit to this as well. A font is a product, produced by a business. And like all products produced by businesses, there are low-quality examples that get smashed out en mass, and high-quality examples in which every tiny detail has been scrutinized to within an inch of its life.
A font with several different weights is more likely to be the latter as they generally get designed with a bit more versatility in mind.
Resist the urge to use a header font and a different font for the body text. This can work out nicely, but more often than not it doesn’t look very good. Leave that option for the full-time graphic designers. ;)
3 – When in doubt, use Helvetica.
This will be met with laughter by some people in the graphic design world: After being almost universal for the last 60 years, Helvetica has become a bit of a cliché in design circles and some professionals are downright sick of seeing it. But the reason Helvetica (or it’s updated child Helvetica-Neue) is so universal, is because it’s a good looking, versatile, classic design. Classic designs are classic for a reason: they just work.
You won’t stand out as a paragon of design by using Helvetica, but you won’t run the risk of looking like a catastrophe either.
This will be met with laughter by some people in the graphic design world: After being almost universal for the last 60 years, Helvetica has become a bit of a cliché in design circles and some professionals are downright sick of seeing it. But the reason Helvetica (and it’s younger progeny Helvetica-Neue) is so universal, is because it’s a classic, good looking, versatile design. Classic designs are classic for a reason: they just work.
You won’t stand out as a paragon of design by using Helvetica, but you won’t run the risk of looking like a catastrophe either.
