Choosing a font for your brand is part of building a brand identity. This is why, you need to know everything that is required to know about fonts, and how you should choose them. 

You have to pick a brand font not just for business cards, but for logo design, and brand messaging as well.

The perfect font that brands pick, should be unique, legible, and flexible and must communicate brand personality to customers. 

This article is going to talk about the factors that you need to consider to choose a font for your brand. As well as it explains the key points to keep in mind before choosing any font.

Brand Personality

Every brand has a personality, and that is something that customers relate to. When deciding the brand color scheme or logo design, a company should remember that these things matter in defining brand personality. To define a brand’s personality, think of adjectives that are relevant to your brand. 

For example, your brand is exclusive, flexible, friendly or bold. These adjectives should reflect in the font you choose for your brand. If you choose a popular font, then that might give your brand an elegant and bold personality. 

Understanding Fonts

Fonts are not just something you change on Microsoft Word, to make a document look better. They are much more than that, and to understand each font and what message it conveys, you need to learn about typography. 

There are six basic classifications of fonts, from which you can choose; serif, sans-serif, slab serif, handwritten and decorative.

Times New Roman, a font commonly used by people, is Serif. Roboto and Open Sans are classified as Sans Serif and are a modern, minimal and clean font. 

Why You Should Choose the Most Popular Fonts?

There are many brands around the world and each brand logo contains a font within it. Every brand has a different font used within its logo’s but there are few fonts that have been used by thousands of brands around the globe and few of them are very popular.

First of all, we would talk about a Slab Serif, it is bold, quirky, and confident; Courier New is a Slab Serif font. The script is another classification, which is elegant and unites, and slightly italic. As for handwritten font, it is mostly used for informal and artistic purposes. The last one is decorative; it is a stylized, distinctive and dramatic font, like Fredericks.

Arial is a sans-serif typeface and is used in many computer fonts. There are so many fonts, which belong to the Arial font family. They are used in popular operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac, and PostScript computer printers. 

This typeface was designed by Robin Nicholas in 1982; he designed it alongside with Patricia Saunders for Monotype Typography. This font was created after the creators were inspired by Helvetica.

The character widths of this font are identical, and it has many styles like italic, medium, medium italic, and bold italic. You will find the Arial font free almost everywhere, as it became a free font when Windows 3.1 was released. The reason why this font is so famous is that it is very easy to understand and looks professional. 

When you look around, you will see many brands and airlines using Arial fonts, on advertisement boards. Gerry Webber is a German clothing company, and it uses Arial font as its logo. 

There is a Thai cuisine in Amsterdam, called Kinnaree, which uses an Arial black font. They use the font for their window signs, as well as for the menu. 

Kaldi Koffie is a Dutch coffee shop, and it has been using Arial font consistently for its logo, text, and branding. Even transportation vans use Arial typeface on the back and side of the vans.

Similarly, when UPS sends packages to customers, they use Arial font on their stickers. The tracking information and even the barcode are printed in Arial. In Holland, when people go to fill government forms, they have to use DigiD. At the top of the letter, DigiDuses Arial font, which means the government, wants to create a brand identity for them. 

Basic Requirements

There are three basic requirements that brands have to meet when it comes to fonts. 

Budget and Licensing

When a brand finally finds the font that it wants, it needs to think about how it will source its font. There are some libraries that offer free and open source font; Google Fonts, Font Squirrel and Font Library are such fonts. 

If you want to know more about fonts, you can look at Venngage editor. This editor will tell you the fonts that brands can use. Even though these free libraries are convenient, they still offer limited fonts, like bold and italic fonts. 

If brands want to get paid licensed fonts, then they can get them from Adobe Fonts, linotype, and Fonts.com. There are so many options, which brands can access when they visit these websites. Even though you have to pay an individual fee and license fee, you can still get the font of your choice. Moreover, if you want to use separate fonts for a mobile app, mobile website, and print materials, then you need to pay for three font licenses.

Flexibility of Fonts

The font you choose should be flexible because they are going to be around for a long time. Some brands change their fonts, but after many years, when they want to give their brand a new look. You need to make sure that you have the proper license for the fonts you choose, so you don’t have to suffer from embarrassment later. 

You don’t only have to pick a font for your brand, but for blogs, packaging design, and external presentations. Before picking a font, make sure that you test it and see how it looks at different things.

Font Weights

The brand fonts have different weights, like light regular, semibold and even bold. Such font weights are very important for building a text hierarchy, which defines a brand’s style guide. A brand will require different font weights for header, subheadings, body, and quotes. To get a better idea of how font weights are used, it is best to read different articles and take help from them.

Legible Fonts

When picking fonts, you need to make sure that the brand fonts are legible. They should be easy to understand and must be styled in a way that every reader is able to understand it, even from a distance. The brand fonts that you use for body paragraphs, have to be more legible as compared to the headers. 

Fonts to Avoid

Don’t use fonts that would remind people of their English essays, or the ones that they have to squint their eyes to understand. For example, there are digitally printed shirts available in the market, which have confusing fonts and people have to squint their eyes to understand them. If a customer is not able to read the font, then what identity is the brand setting?

Similarly, a brand should not use Times New Roman for their logo, because that is too bookish. Unless someone is advertising a book club, Times New Roman is not acceptable. 

Mistakes to Avoid While Choosing a Font?

The first mistake that brands make, when they are picking a font, is that they don’t realize their own brand identity. 

For example, if a brand is known for its bookish appeal, and it uses a very decorative font, then what message are they sending to the customer? Similarly, if a brand is chic and it uses Sans Serif font, then it won’t work well for the brand. 

Brands have to test out their font before they put it on their website, business card, articles and logo. They can get the opinion of different customers about how they feel when they see a certain font. This can help them decide better which font they want to choose, and the one that would be more appropriate. 

Sticking to A Single Font is Ideal!

Brands should limit the total number of fonts that they can use. This is because too many fonts can confuse the customer. When brands use fonts, then the customer becomes familiar with those fonts and associates them with the brand. 

A customer becoming familiar with fonts is known as brand positioning. A font can be used for brand positioning and can be very helpful in establishing a brand image. 

If you use multiple fonts, or three fonts in together, but they are similar then that won’t work well with the brand. Even if you want to create visual diversity, you should never use more than 3 fonts or ones that are similar in nature. 

Moreover, you should use an ideal combination of font and the background of a brand. You will have to choose a color scheme for your font, so contrast it with the background of your brand. 

Conclusions

Don’t use too many bright colors; if the background is bright, make sure that the font adjusts with it well. It is best to test different fonts using computer applications, so that when the printing is done and the final font is chosen, then a brand doesn’t have to suffer. Choose the right font for your brand, so that you can create a mass appeal for your customers.