Along with colours and graphics, typography plays a pivotal role in branding, acting as the visual voice of a company’s identity. The choice of your brand’s fonts can significantly impact how it will be perceived and remembered by its audience. At Grafico, our approach to typography revolves around three core principles: personality, consistency, and legibility.
Show your brand’s personality
Different fonts convey distinct personalities and tones. Whether it’s sleek and modern, traditional and elegant, or playful and whimsical, typography sets the mood for the brand’s message. Understanding your brand’s identity, audience, and desired perception is crucial. Your font choices are key assets in building your image. For logos, we take it a step further by customizing the typeface to ensure it is 100% unique and tailored to your brand.
Consistency is key
Consistent use of typography across all brand materials is essential in building recognition. At Grafico, we typically limit font choices to 1, 2 or maximum 3 options, each serving a specific purpose (display, titles, body) in order to facilitating brand coherence and development. As designers, we ensure that all selected fonts form a coherent set and that each font fulfills its intended role. We also facilitate consistency by providing options that are always accessible to the clients, in line with their budget and the tools they use. We understand it’s not everyone who is ready to spend thousands of dollars on a single typeface, and that sometimes what’s most important for the client is to have access to their set of fonts even on Microsoft PowerPoint. Our job is to take all of this into consideration when choosing fonts.
Don’t forget legibility
When communicating about your brand, the first thing you want to ensure is that messages are easy to read and comprehend. So as cool as a font might look, if it’s not legible, it’s probably not the right choice. Display typefaces can of course be funky and crazy (we go back to part 1: showing your brand’s personality through typography). In very specific cases, designers even use some ultra funky fonts only to achieve a cool graphic look and not for the text to be read for real. But let’s be true here: 99% of the time our job consists of making messages look nice and easy to read, and this is why legibility is in our top 3 of things we consider when picking fonts for a brand. Let’s also note that parameters such as font size, kerning, and line spacing also impact legibility and must be handled with care.
In conclusion, typography is far more than just selecting a font; it’s about crafting a visual language that effectively communicates your brand’s message and essence. By paying attention to typography, brands can create a cohesive identity that resonates with their audience, fosters brand loyalty, and ultimately drives success in the marketplace.
“As designers, we have the eye to choose a font, know where it’ll work and how to tweak it to make it just right. This typographic fine-tuning demands expertise. However, anyone, even outside the design industry, would be able to tell when something is wrong with typography. A weird spacing, a font choice that feels off, a paragraph that is too small or too big. Missteps in typography can lead to awkwardness and impractical designs, which is why brands hire design experts” — Orlando, Art Director at Grafico.
Blu Element’s branding is based on the idea of contrast between business and pleasure, because practical tech accessories must work for both parts of our lives. We worked with fonts to enhance this dichotomy, using one typeface to represent the seriousness of our work lives and another rounder typeface to evoke our time off. Playing with fonts like this is a great way to give a brand personality and make it very unique.
