What are the different font types & why do they matter?

When you’re creating a brand, some of the main choices you’ll make are a color palette and a logo icon. To this, you will add images/unique designs, content themes, and maybe even music or a slogan. One of my favorite examples of this is the Masterpiece Theatre theme song. If you’re older, you might remember other slogans that big brands used to use. Most small businesses only deal with the fonts, colors, and images + icons.

So, when you’re working to create your brand, it might be nice to work with a designer. These folks are trained in helping you match your vision with the symbols and psychology that work. Some clients want to decide what colors the designer uses. When I say “work”, I mean they will attract your ideal customer and inspire them to entrust you with their business. One example of this is a concept called Color Theory.

The second main branding tool is a font. There are several categories of fonts. First, we must understand the serif. A serif is the little do-hickey at the ends of letters. Notice this font does not have that. It is lacking, or sans (“without” in French), this little line at the ends.

In the beginning, there were no fonts. Now, we have thousands and thousands of fonts. Certain fonts “work” on people – and the fascinating thing about it is that people don’t know they’re doing certain things. They’re little hypnotists. Some fonts will attack your eyeballs. Some fonts seamlessly make you calm, hungry, confident, or trusting. Weird, huh?

When choosing a Font Family, you may begin by using your gut. If a font speaks to you, your designer will help you to know whether that will further your brand’s “identity”, or if it takes away from the main point. Designers help clients choose appropriate fonts using psychology as well. The study of fonts is called Typography. There’s too much to say about that here.

Your font may be used in your logo, website, business cards, promotional materials like tablecloths for fairs, stickers, tee shirts, and so on. Keeping the font the same everywhere is called brand consistency. In your work with a website designer, for example, you may be somewhat limited with fonts for a variety of different reasons. One is legibility. You want your font to be readable in prose text. That is, long paragraphs. The other reason is that custom fonts slow down the loading time of websites. You want to make sure your client doesn’t close a page too soon while your font loads. The last, is accessibility. Accessibility in Design is a whole discipline! For screen readers and people with low vision, your site will not be accessible if the font is an image instead of words. This is one reason why people create Alt Text for images: it describes the image to people who are only listening (e.g., when they’re using a screen reader). Fun fact: alt text improves your SEO: search engine optimization!

A good designer will guide you on the font. Try to remember they have expertise in this area. Designers know what a font feels like to customers & what message it conveys. Whether your font is corporate or personal.

Designers have access to font libraries. They most likely have access through Adobe Creative Cloud and hand-designed fonts. Think about choosing a font in Microsoft Word or on Canva, if you’ve tinkered with them before. (Pro tip: it’s not legal for you to use designs made on Canva for profit!) These libraries have a list to choose from and you can make them italic, bold, or underlined. Designers can mess with things like line and letter s p a c i n g, and much more.

The best thing you can do is bring band collateral (mood boards, logos you like, website screenshots or links, etc.) to the table in your initial conversation with your designer. Collect some images of designs you like using a platform like Pinterest. Here’s a collection I’m working on. Notice whether the fonts are serif or sans serif just for fun. When you give a designer this material, sometimes they can distill it down into what you are looking for. They may still give you feedback. However, sometimes the things you like have nothing to do with each other, besides that you like them. So, don’t overwhelm your designer, just let them know what’s influenced you and let them take over and work their magic.

Whether you choose a serif or sans-serif font, good luck on your brand design journey. As always, if you need a website or logo, you can always contact us!