Personality is a huge part of building a brand. You can express your brand's personality through a variety of ways, one of which is by the typeface. In this post, we will take a look at how to choose a font for your brand.
Don't underestimate the power of fonts, they can engage people just as much as they can put people off - so it is important to pick the right font. Assisting with personality and tone of voice your fonts will appear in your logo (if your logo uses text), strapline, website, creative material, adverts and more!
Complimentary Brand Fonts
There will be different parts of your brand where you will want to use different fonts. If you had a website that used one font in the same size and style throughout, it wouldn't look appealing - the same if you went font crazy and used loads of different styles and sizes.
If you decided to use different fonts you will want to choose a minimal amount, perhaps two or three and make sure they work well together and don't look out of place.
For example, your logo could use a different font to your strapline, which is both different from the text throughout your site. Your logo and strapline can utilise more decorative and stylised fonts as they will only appear a few times throughout your brand and material. The rest of your content should use a font that's more easily read when forming a wall of text, however, you will still want this font to continue to express your brand's personality.
Font Personality
Just like your brand's colour palette, fonts are a brilliant way to express your brand's personality and have an impact on emotion.
Before we take a look into what font to choose, you will want to understand the five classifications of typefaces; serif, sans serif, script, display and monospaced.
Serif
Serif is one of the oldest typefaces, it features extra stokes at the end of letters, often referred to as feet.
Sans Serif
Once you understand Serif, San serif is easy. Sans serif fonts simply do not have the feet and flicks serif fonts have.
Script
Script fonts are casual and flow quite fluid, often mimicking handwriting. While script fonts can look really nice for straplines they aren't good for big walls of text.
Display
Display fonts are used for headings or large signs and are not for your content as they are bold and quite 'in your face', however, display fonts can look quite variable.
Monospace
Monospace fonts use the same horizontal spacing throughout the lettering, most commonly seen in typewriters and for typesetting computer code.
You can already see the above give off different feels and influence your emotions. Bouncy, fun looking fonts can make you feel happy. Slender and fine fonts can add that extra elegance and class. When choosing a font for your brand you will want to take a look at the elements you want to express in your brand - is it playful, clever, serious, comforting, technical or have another attribute you wish to impact on the end-user? A military brand wouldn't use a fancy, bubbly or cartoonish font, as they just wouldn't be taken seriously as a professional service.
Test different fonts
Don't just decide to choose one font and go with it. You will want to choose a variety of fonts and test them out and compare them. You can simply do this by making multiple dummy adverts, logos and content and see which ones feel and look right for your brand.
Sometimes being involved in something for so long can lead to tunnel vision - get an outside perspective to see what they think.
We're here to discuss your branding, its development and more get in touch with Mason Mallett via mason.mallett@dupreeinternational or give us as a call on +44 (0)1780 757666.