What The Font! Understand How Your Brand’s Typeface Affects You Customers View Of Your Business

Along with things like your logo, colours, and imagery, typography is one of the essential components of branding. Typography is defined as "the art or practice of organising type or processing data and printing from it", which is essentially the organisation of text in a compelling, fascinating, and readable fashion. It's important to get the typography correct because it's used throughout your business, including in your logo, website, social media visuals, printed materials, and more. Choosing the ideal typefaces for your business is one of the key strategies to do this, but how do you choose which font to use? Fonts vs Typeface: What’s the difference? Fonts and typeface are sometimes used interchangeably, but these are actually two very distinct concepts. A typeface is a collection of one or more fonts, each made up of glyphs that have similar visual characteristics. To put it simply, a typeface is made up of various fonts. A typeface like Helvetica, for instance, is composed of various font styles, including roman, italic, heavy, bold, etc. A typeface is thus a collective term to refer to a bunch of similar fonts. The weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, and ornamentation of each font in a typeface are all distinct. To better comprehend this, consider how tracks on an album would compare. The songs that make up an album are all individually composed by the same artist and are of the same genre, but the album as a whole is made up of those tracks. The fonts and typeface are analogous to the songs on the CD. Another way to look at them is as members of a family, with the typefaces acting as the many children. Typefaces are occasionally referred to as a font family, particularly in web development where the term serves as the class name. The idea is the same: Helvetica is the font family, but there are various weight and size variations within it. You should search for a typeface that includes a selection of typefaces in order to select the ideal fonts for your brand. The main reason for this is that your brand will have various use cases and have a variety of related fonts at your disposal makes the creative process a little easier. For instance, you might want a heavier font on certain headings on a brochure, but a lighter font on the paragraph text that sits underneath those headings. Serif, sans serif, script, monospaced, blackletter, and other typeface classifications help to categorize typefaces and make it simpler for you to select the ones that are most suited for your brand and its values. It's paramount to select the appropriate typeface for the task at hand and to be aware of what you're searching for since the typeface you use has a significant impact on the mood you want to convey, what you want to say, how people feel, and what you want to remind them of. For instance, choosing a gothic blackletter typeface for a children's clothing shop would utterly transmit the wrong impression and probably scare customers away from buying! Additionally, adopting an extremely ornate script calligraphy typeface for a future event is unlikely to draw in the correct crowd. According to Max Phillips, "type is what meaning looks like". The typeface you chose has a lot of meanings attached to it, so pick carefully, consider why you're using each one, and think about what it will mean to the reader. Things to remember when choosing a typeface When searching for the ideal typeface for your brand, it's critical to keep an eye out for an option that offers a choice of fonts. You can utilise fonts more freely and effectively and get a larger range of uses by selecting a typeface with several weights and styles. A typeface may include italic variations as well as weights ranging from extremely light to extremely heavy. This will help to assure the lifespan of your typeface choice because you won't have to continually switch typefaces in the future due to a lack of possibilities. The licensing of the typefaces is one of the most crucial factors to consider when picking fonts since if you get this incorrect, you might get into a lot of legal issues. No matter where you obtain a typeface, it will always come with a licence. Some may be free for personal use but charge for commercial use, while others may demand payment for all uses. Some may be licensed under Creative Commons, making them potentially free to use in any circumstance. There are many variances between these choices, so make sure you read the policies of the foundry or retailer you're buying from and abide by them to avoid getting into issues with the law. How simple it is for your team to use and distribute the typeface is something else to take into account. It's crucial to ensure that developers, designers, and anybody else who needs to utilise the font can use and access your font files. With some, this will be simple and free, which is what you want, but with others, you could need to pay for additional people to use the typeface or it might be difficult to distribute them or use them in your website construction or collateral designs. If you are looking for potential typeface options for your brand, we recommend the below platforms:

• Adobe Typekit
• Google Fonts
• FontSpace

Once you have decided on the ideal typeface for your brand, you can consider putting your new corporate identity to good use. Browse the Brandability website to get a good overview of potential branded products that you can purchase and customise with your brand!