Why Do Font Choices Matter?
Fonts tell a story
Successful companies choose fonts that tell a story of their brand for them. Appropriate font and color choices influence consumers’ feelings and connections with your brand. The font you choose sets the tone for the values and objectives that your brand represents and helps you differentiate from the competition e.g. Coca-Cola.
What You Need
Essentially, there are two fonts that are vital to branding. A display font, and a body text font. Display fonts are expressive, attention grabbing fonts used sparingly. This is the font you use for your logo, and for headings. It is a unique font, ideally associated only with your brand, and is used to capture the essence of what your brand represents. As shown in examples in the infographic using a Greek theme font for a Greek restaurant is an obvious choice, while for a spa a relaxing script font will work well.
The second font, a body text font, is a simpler font that is used commonly, like Times New Roman or Helvetica, is essential for all your informational text such as paragraphs on your website, content on flyers and business cards, etc. because body text fonts are easy to read at a small size and in paragraph form, which display fonts are not. Using a consistent body text font is just that – consistent. It makes your brand look polished, intentional, and detail oriented.
Choosing the Correct Font Combinations:
When choosing a font, it is important that you know what you’re looking for. Think about your brand and make a concise list of the qualities and characteristics that you want your brand to portray and choose the correct font that embodies it.
For building a brand choose only 2-3 fonts
- Display font for the logo and heading
- Display font for logo and subheading
- Text font.
They all should work together and create a balance to reinforce your brand personality. Some combination examples are shown in the infographic.
It is important in this process that you do not choose a font that you personally like but can’t justify using for your brand. If you like the way it looks, you may be satisfied with the result, but if it does not reflect your brand strongly enough, it will not yield the results you’re hoping for. It is also important to weed out any fonts that are too ornate, complex, campy, or otherwise overwhelming. Some of these fonts are very fun, expressive, and eye-catching, but prove to be illegible when shrunken down for business cards, pictures on social media, mobile phones, and other marketing devices whose job it is to promote your brand.
Understanding these things will help you create a professional logo that accurately represents your company and services/products it offers. Our earlier blog FONTS 101 explains the importance of typography. By choosing the right colors and fonts you can develop a brand that connects with the clients you want.