Fonts can make or break your design – they affect tone, legibility, brand recognition, and just as the right fonts can attract your ideal customers, choosing the wrong one can turn them off.
But with so many fonts to choose from how do you find the right one? Here are my tips to help you choose the perfect font for your brand:
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Style
Fonts come in many different styles and that affects how people view your brand. So you need to pick one that’s appropriate for your business.
That’ll depend on what kind of business you have and what kind of customers you’re trying to attract. So if you’re a very serious business, looking to attract serious, corporate professionals, you’ll need a font that feels serious. That means no Comic Sans – or comic-style fonts at all!
If you want a traditional feel, chances are you’ll try a serif font. And sans-serif tend to feel more modern.
Script fonts tend to feel quite feminine (which is why you see them so often on wedding stationery), while monospace fonts tend to feel quite techy.
Even within broad classifications like these, there are huge differences in style. Calligraphic script fonts tend to feel quite formal, while handwriting or brush style fonts have a more relaxed, creative or personal feel.
If you run a vintage tearoom, for example, then retro fonts can work well. But different fonts will work for a formal setting (think waitresses in black dresses with pristine white aprons, dainty little sandwiches with the crusts cut off and tiny, beautifully finished cakes) than for a more relaxed, homely setting (think shabby chic and cakes like your granny used to make).
Think about whether you need a font that looks childish, fun, elegant, modern, hand-drawn or retro, for example. Many font sites will categorise the fonts using keywords like this which should make it easier to find one that’s appropriate.
Legibility
It’s so important that your text can be read so don’t make it hard for your readers by using really swirly and fancy fonts for large amounts of text or in small sizes. Because if people can’t read your business name, they’re not likely to take much notice of you or remember you the next they’re deciding where to go for cake (hmm, there’s definitely a cake theme going on today – you hungry yet?!)
So save the super-fancy fonts for large headlines or short taglines.
Additionally, if your audience may have issues with reading, for example people with dyslexia or the partially sighted, it’s vital that you choose a font they can read easily. Many fonts have been designed specially to maximise legibility for such people; a simple Google search can help you find some.
Free or paid
There are thousands of free fonts to choose from, but beware: not all of them are well designed. Some of them are poorly traced copies of premium fonts and some have issues with letter spacing.
Premium fonts are less likely to have design issues but some of them can be really expensive. Luckily, there are places to find quality free or reasonably priced fonts – check out this post for some of my favourites.
Google Fonts is one of my favourites. It’s a great resource – not only are the fonts free to use, but you can install them on your website to keep your branding consistent.
It can also help you choose a set of fonts to use in your branding. Once you’ve chosen your main brand font, if you’re unsure what to pair it with, such as for your tagline, or for body text, check out its page on Google Fonts. Scroll down and you’ll see some popular pairings – fonts that are commonly used alongside your chosen font.
For example, if you’ve chosen Playfair Display, you’ll see 5 suggested fonts to team it with, and you can try them out. In this example I’ve teamed Playfair Display Bold with Raleway regular:
But see how the feel changes if I make Cookie the heading font and Playfair Display the body font instead:
What do you like?
Your brand is a representation of you, your values and your products or services, so, while it’s vital that the fonts you use appeal to your ideal customers, it’s also important that you like it. After all, if you don’t like your own branding, that can affect your confidence when you’re marketing your business.
So look hard at the fonts you’re considering. Do any of the letters look weird to you? Trust me, this is something to think about. Letters like G (especially lowercase g), Q and characters like ampersands often have design quirks that you’ll either love or hate.
These quirks can be the thing that really attracts you to a font, giving it personality – such as the W in Raleway (Poiret One also has this, but the slant of the lowercase e puts me off!).
And if you hate them, try looking for a different font so that you don’t have to change the way you write to avoid using a particular letter!
Try pairing different fonts together to see which ones you like, but try to keep to a limited selection. It’s easier to create a recognisable brand if you have just 2 or 3 core fonts that you use most of the time.
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