Have you ever seen a Brand and thought to yourself, the fonts selected doesn’t suit them?
Fonts have their own unique personalities, choosing the right fonts is also an important part of the branding process. Along with your colours, photography style, words, logo/brand marks, templates, illustrations/patterns - fonts are also another ingredient that goes into creating a meaningful brand and should not be overlooked.
You want to make sure when choosing your fonts they represent your brand, do they appeal to your ideal target audience, do they work well together and are they balanced?
Before choosing your fonts you need to understand a bit about the typeface and fonts.
Typefaces are categories such as Serif, Sans Serif, Script and Monospace made up of different fonts.
Fonts are the styles or a larger typeface such as Helvetica is a font that is part of the Sans Serif family.
There is a variety of typefaces and fonts, a quick introduction of some are below:
SERIF
These have extended features ‘serifs’ at the end of the letter/symbol and been around since Times Old Roman. These are classic, timeless, trustworthy, traditional and elegant. These are the easiest to read when used for large block text, books or blogs.
Fonts in the Serif typeface include such as Times New Roman and Book Antiqua.
SANS SERIF
These are without the extended features ‘serifs’ at the end of the letter/symbol. These have a minimal, clean and modern look. They work well in body text when not too lengthy.
Fonts in the Sans Serif typeface include such as Helvetica, Arial and Verdana.
MONOSPACE: SLAB SERIF
These where used in classical typesetting/printing - letters and characters have the same amount of horizontal fixed space. Described as sans-serif fonts with added serifs and has an old school feel.
Fonts in the Monospace typeface include such as Courier and Monaco.
SCRIPT
These are based on fluid/varied strokes and imitate handwriting. There is casual or formal scripts and depending ones you choose can create a certain look/feel for your brand. These are hard to read as body text so they work better as headers or subtitles. Handwritten, calligraphy or brush fonts.
Fonts in the Script typeface include such as Kristi and Alex Brush.
How to pair your fonts
Let’s chat about pairing fonts, now that we have gone through the quick introduction of typeface and fonts. Not all fonts work together and the key is to find the right balance with the fonts you select and keep consistent with your brand.
Different typefaces evoke different feelings so choosing your fonts to establish your brand style is important. As well as to keep in mind to achieve the different feel with fonts this can be created by also the letter spacing, colour and positioning.
If fonts chosen don’t match your brands identity choosing the wrong fonts can give the wrong feel. For example if your brand is an elegant, high end clothing store and a brush stroke/grungy font has been chosen this would not be suitable nor make sense for that brand.
If you are struggling to pair your fonts and to help you find combinations some places you cant try below:
Font Pairing Example:
A elegant font (serif) used for the main header paired with a modern font (sans serif) for secondary heading and used also for the body copy.
Selecting Fonts
I recommend selecting and sticking to a combination of 2 (3 max). Having too many fonts will be messy, busy and cluttered - just like if you have too many colours to your brand.
Select a main/primary header font that you will use on your headlines/header, titles - Select a different font for your body copy that you will use on your main website text, invoices/contracts, marketing material and blogs.
You can for example if you are using a sans serif uppercase for your main/primary font you can use a lowercase for your secondary font to differentiate. Other ways you can use fonts - by letter spacing, colour or making fonts bold.
Once you have selected your fonts be consistent when using them, throughout all your channels.
Where can you find beautiful FREE fonts to use?
If you are not in the position due to budget to invest in buying fonts there is now more than ever FREE font alternatives available for you, below is some suggestions where you can find fonts:
Hope you found this blog helpful, if you have any questions pop them below.
Effie x