BRANDING: Choosing Fonts For Your Brand

Branding isn’t just for large companies. Small and medium sized businesses benefit from branding too. Branding doesn’t stop with the creation of a company’s name. That’s just the beginning. A company’s brand should consist of multiple elements: it’s identity, as well as it’s messaging. A company’s brand must be so unique that it can easily be recognized by the consumer and separated from all other competing brands.

The identity is the image of the brand and includes: the logo, a color palette, and the fonts. The selected fonts for a company’s logo and messaging are essential and if used correctly will give credibility to the brand. They will make a company’s brand distinct. Fonts have personalities, and like a company’s logo, they should support the company’s message. The company’s fonts should match the company’s image and personality. Is the company serious, playful, or formal? The font selection should reflect this e.g. conservative businesses shouldn’t pick loud and complicated fonts. Another thing to consider is that a company’s brand should also match the personality and preferences of its clients.

Companies should be consistent in their font use for all their marketing and promotional materials. All marketing materials should have a limited number of font families (a font family includes a normal, bold and italic variation of a particular font). Using more than three font families is excessive and may come across as unprofessional.

Consider specific company fonts for:

• The logo: This font should be unique and interesting and should not be one of the default fonts installed with Windows. Logos may use two or three different fonts. In this case a company might want to use one of the fonts as a secondary font too.

• A secondary font: A unique and interesting font for headlines, sub-headlines, taglines, special text graphics, captions, and pull quotes. Consider using a logo font as a secondary font. 

• A tertiary font: A highly legible font like a serif font for mid length texts and long printed documents. Typically printed materials are more easily read if they are in a serif font rather than a sans-serif font. Serif fonts have little those tiny little "feet," at the ends of their letters. Examples include Times, Palatino, and Garamond. Tertiary sans-serif fonts may be used for shorter printed documents. In Sans-serif fonts those little feet are missing and they look more clean and modern. "Sans" means “without”. Some of the more common san serif fonts are Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, and Helvetica.

• Online fonts: San serif text on a computer monitor for websites, emails, and HTML newsletters is easier to read than serif. Online fonts should be limited by what a user might have installed on their computer and most likely will be Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, or Trebuchet MS. Otherwise the text may default to whatever is selected by the user’s browser. Serif fonts can be used on websites; but may be better as headlines and subheadings. These include Times, Times New Roman, and Georgia.

Things to consider in choosing a company's font:

Make sure that the font is legible in large and small size formats, faxed, and in color as well as black and white. The company should have the rights to it’s fonts and that they can be easily installed on all it’s computers. Typically companies settle and stay with the default Microsoft’s Office Suite fonts: Times and Arial. Using these fonts doesn’t create much of a visual brand difference between a company and it's competitors. Font types are usually Post Script, True Type, or Open Type. Post Script fonts are an industry standard for professional printers. They are available for both Macintosh computers and PCs as different formats cannot be shared between machines. True Type fonts are found on PCs and do not print as well as Postscript fonts. A company might want to consider purchasing the newer Open Type fonts, which are cross-platform Mac and PC compatible.