How To Choose Fonts For Your Brand

Introduction

You’ve just decided to launch your online business or do a complete rebranding and struggle to choose fonts for your brand?

No worries!

This article covers everything you need to know to find the perfect fonts.

Because choosing the right fonts for your online business is an important step of your general branding, picking them poses many challenges.

Without further ado, let’s discuss everything you need to know to choose the typography for your brand.

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Why is it important to choose the right brand fonts?

Fonts carry weight, personality, and emotions, playing a vital role in how a brand communicates with its audience.

Just like your color palette, the fonts you choose will be an important part of your visual brand.

Here’s why it’s essential to make the right font choice:

1. First Impressions: Much like how an outfit can make a lasting first impression, fonts set the immediate tone for your website visitors. Before delving into content, visitors will gauge your site’s professionalism, style, and reliability partly based on your typography.
2. Readability and Accessibility: Beyond aesthetics, it’s paramount for users to easily read and understand your content. Choosing fonts that are clear and legible on all devices ensures that visitors stay engaged and can navigate your content without strain.
3. Brand Identity and Personality: Every font has a personality, whether it’s bold, elegant, quirky, or formal. By selecting fonts that align with your brand’s values and message, you help reinforce your brand’s personality.
4. Consistency and Trust: Employing a consistent set of fonts across all platforms and touchpoints ensures a cohesive brand experience. This consistency helps in brand recognition and fosters a sense of trust and reliability among users.
5. Emotional Engagement: Fonts can evoke emotions, from the excitement of a bold display typeface to the warmth of a handwritten script. By tapping into these emotions, your brand has the power to form deeper connections and resonate more profoundly with your readers.
6. Differentiation from Competitors: Unique and thoughtful font choices can make your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace. Using distinctive fonts can set your brand apart and make it memorable.

In essence, your fonts are a powerful tool in your brand’s visual toolkit. Making the right font choice will not only enhance your brand’s aesthetics but also boost engagement, trust, and brand recall.

Understanding font styles and their best use

Before choosing your brand fonts, you need to understand font families and what they are best used for.

Here’s a basic guide to understanding the different font styles and their impact on brand perception:

1. Serif Fonts (e.g., Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond)
   • Appearance: These fonts have small decorative lines or “feet” at the ends of letters.
   • Perception: They often convey a sense of tradition, respectability, and reliability. They’re viewed as classic and timeless.
   • Typically Used: Print materials like books and newspapers. Online, they’re often used for more traditional or sophisticated brands.
2. Sans Serif Typefaces (e.g., Arial, Helvetica, Calibri)
   • Appearance: Clean lines without the “feet” or decorative ends.
   • Perception: Modern, straightforward, and clean. They convey a sense of simplicity and modernity.
   • Typically Used: Sans serifs are great for digital content, especially on websites and apps, due to their clear legibility on screens. You simply can’t go wrong with a simple sans serif font for your body text and a bold sans serif font for titles. Sans Serif fonts are also great for simple logos. Visby and Alyssum are, for example, perfect sans serif logo fonts.
3. Script Fonts (e.g., Pacifico, Brush Script)
   • Appearance: Resemble handwritten or cursive styles.
   • Perception: Elegant, personal, creative, and sometimes feminine. They can add a touch of luxury or personalization.
   • Typically Used: Invitations, logos, headers, or any place where a touch of elegance or flair is needed. They should be used sparingly on websites to ensure readability. If you plan on using a script font, don’t forget to test capital letters as they can look very different from lowercase letters and be harder to read. Ananda Black and Lemon Jelly are examples of popular cursive logo fonts.
4. Display/Decorative Fonts (e.g., Lobster, Jokerman)
   • Appearance: Unique and often more stylized than other fonts.
   • Perception: Fun, quirky, and distinctive. These fonts can quickly grab attention but can also feel less professional if misused.
   • Typically Used: Display and decorative fonts are perfect for headers and statements. They are also great logo fonts. However. they are never recommended for body text.
5. Monospace Fonts (e.g., Courier New, Roboto Mono)
   • Appearance: Each letter occupies the same amount of space.
   • Perception: Technical, machine-like, or reminiscent of the typewriter era.
   • Typically Used: Code, technical documentation, or to evoke a vintage or technical feel.

5 factors to consider when choosing your brand fonts

1 . Overall readability

The very first thing you should take into account when choosing your brand’s fonts is the overall readability.

This is the reason why sans sans serifs fonts are to be prioritized for online content:

Comparing Times New Roman and Source Sans Pro, it’s easy to see that the complex letterforms of Times New Roman require more time and effort to read than the sans serif’s relatively simple forms.

The difference might seem trivial when reading one sentence, but serif fonts really tire the eye when reading on a screen.

If you want your readers to stick with you and read your 2000-word blog articles until the very end, you need to make sure you use fonts that are easy on the eye.

2 . Font family

Having a variety of weights and styles at your disposal is incredibly useful when creating content online.

Certain design variations work better at large sizes than small, and vice versa, which is why you’ll see variant styles of a font like display, caption, condensed, etc.

Here’s an example of some of the variations of the font Playfair Display:

3 . Easily distinguishable letter forms

Alphabets enable an infinite range of expressions with very few graphical elements.

That’s good news for us; imagine having to memorize hundreds of letters…

However, the unfortunate side effect is that some letterforms are very easy to confuse, especially when they’re set at smaller sizes.

Here are the most common culprits for letter confusion:

• oO0 (lowercase O, capital O, and zero)
• lI1 (lowercase L, capital i, and the number 1)
• aoec (lowercase a, lowercase o, lowercase e, and lowercase c)

This problem can be particularly pronounced in geometric fonts (like Futura, Balgin, etc.), so think carefully before choosing one of these for your brand.

4 . Font x-height

The “x-height” of a font refers to the height of lowercase letters, specifically the height of the lowercase “x” in that typeface. It doesn’t include any parts of letters that extend above the main body (like the ascender of a lowercase “b”) or below it (like the descender of a lowercase “y”).

X-height is an essential characteristic of typeface design for several reasons:

1. Legibility: Fonts with a larger x-height tend to be more legible, especially at smaller sizes. This is because the main body of the text, being more prominent, is easier to discern.
2. Perceived Size: Two fonts at the same point size can look very different in perceived size because of their x-height. A font with a larger x-height will appear bigger than one with a smaller x-height, even if they’re technically the same size.
3. Harmony and Balance: In typeface design, the relationship between x-height, ascenders, descenders, and cap height (the height of uppercase letters) is crucial for the harmony and balance of the font.

When designing or choosing typography for your brand, understanding x-height will help you make the right decision, especially in terms of readability and visual harmony.

5 . Availability across platforms

Last but not least, when choosing your fonts, make sure they are also available on all the graphic design apps you use.

This is particularly important to stay consistent across platforms.

So, after choosing your brand’s fonts, go straight to Canva (or any other graphic design app you use) and check whether these fonts are available there as well.

Should this not be the case, you might want to reconsider your choice or look for a very similar alternative.

However, if you really want to use a font that is not available in your graphic design app, note that most of them offer the possibility to upload fonts on premium plans.

9 Tips to help you find the perfect font pairings

Now that we have discussed the main factors to consider before choosing your brand fonts, you might wonder how to find font families that actually pair well together.

Indeed, you will need different fonts for the different types of content you will create and so you will need to find mainly:

• Logo fonts
• A main font for your body text
• Fonts for your H1, H2, H3, etc. titles
• Handwritten fonts for signatures

Hence, to create a cohesive brand experience, you will need to pick different styles of fonts.

Pairing fonts effectively is an art that will significantly impact the aesthetics and readability of your designs.

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind to pair fonts harmoniously:

1. Contrast is Key: Two fonts that are too similar can clash or be hard to distinguish from one another. Look for fonts that complement each other through contrast. For example, pair a bold headline font with a more subtle body font, thick and thin strokes, rounded sans serifs and cursive handwriting… You want your fonts to be as distinguishable as possible while choosing font types that pair well.
2. Limit the Number: As a general rule, don’t use too many different fonts. Typically, two or three (for specific emphasis or highlights) is a good range to stick to for one piece of content. Using too many fonts can make a design look cluttered and even chaotic.
3. Stay Within a Font Family: Many font families come with various weights (light, regular, bold) and styles (italic, regular). Using different weights and styles from the same family will create cohesion and variety simultaneously.
4. Mind the personality: Ensure the personality of the fonts you’re pairing aligns with the message or tone you want to convey. A playful font might not pair well with a more serious, formal font, for instance.
5. Remember about X-Height: If you’re pairing fonts, it’s often easier to match fonts with similar x-heights. This ensures that neither font overpowers the other and maintains balance in your design.
6. Hierarchy and Function: Determine the function of each font. For instance, one font might be used for headings, another for body text, and a third for captions or quotes. Establishing clear hierarchies can make content more accessible and engaging. And, more importantly: stick to these hierarchies across your website.
7. Avoid Conflicting Personalities: While contrast is good, fonts with entirely different characters or moods can conflict. For example, pairing a very decorative font with a minimalist one can be jarring unless executed with care.
8. Test Legibility: This is especially important for body text. Ensure that any font you choose is legible at the size it will be used. Fonts that look good in headers might not be as clear when shrunk down.
9. Trust Your Eyes: While there are guidelines and principles, there’s also a subjective aspect to font pairing. Sometimes, if it looks good and feels right, it works!

How to test and evaluate fonts for your brand

Testing and evaluating fonts for your brand is the final step in ensuring that your typography choices align with your brand’s message, values, and aesthetics while being optimized for user experience.

Here’s a systematic approach to validate your font choices:

1. Mock-ups in Real Context:
   • Create mock-ups of your branding materials (logo and Favicon, website copy, social media posts, etc) using the fonts you are considering. This will give you a realistic view of how they’ll look in actual usage.
2. Check for Legibility:
   • Ensure your fonts are legible across different sizes and mediums. Display fonts on desktops, mobiles and tablets.
   • Pay special attention to how the font looks at smaller sizes, especially for body text on your website and blog.
3. Consider Different Mediums and Platforms:
   • If your brand will be present across various platforms (website, mobile app, printed material, etc.), test the font on each to ensure consistency and readability.
   • Do not forget to check for any technical issues that might arise in other platforms, especially if it’s a less common font. The same font can look different from one platform to another. You want to make sure your fonts look exactly as they should across all platforms you use.
4. Audience Feedback:
   • Sometimes, it’s helpful to get an external perspective. Gather feedback from a small group representative of your target audience. They can provide insights into how the font feels to them and its perceived message. Social media platforms like X and Facebook are perfect for getting quick user feedback.
5. Licensing and Usability:
   • Ensure you have the appropriate licenses to use the font in all the intended mediums. This is especially important for purchased fonts. A license might give you the right to use a font on your website but not on an app or in an eBook.
6. Test Special Characters and Languages:
   • If your brand operates internationally or uses special characters, ensure the font supports all the necessary glyphs and looks good in other languages.

Remember, while it’s essential to consider functionality and readability, the final font choice also relies heavily on intuition and personal preference. It’s about finding that balance between aesthetics and functionality that best represents your brand.

Resources to find free and paid fonts for your brand

Now that we have covered the main aspects of your font branding strategy you might ask yourself where to actually find and download fonts for your business.

Here’s a quick list of free and paid resources to find stylized fonts for your brand:

1. Google Fonts
   • Google Fonts offers a vast collection (+3,000 font families!) of open-source fonts that can be easily used in websites and downloaded for design use.
2. Font Squirrel
   • Font Squirrel provides high-quality, hand-picked, free fonts that are licensed for commercial work.
3. FontSpace
   • FontSpace offers over 70,000 free fonts shared by designers all over the world. These fonts can be used both for personal and commercial use and it is probably the best free resource to find unique fonts for your business.
4. MyFonts
   • MyFonts is one of the largest font marketplaces with a vast collection of both paid and some free fonts. They often have sales, so it’s worth checking back regularly.
5. CreativeMarket
   • CreativeMarket is a great marketplace for finding unique and versatile font styles that can be use for personal and commercial use. When looking for fonts on this platform make sure you select and purchase the right license based on where you plan to use the fonts. This is important since most creators offer different license types.
6. Fiverr
   • Fiverr is the perfect place to go if you want a unique brand font. The platform will allow you to find freelance creators who can design your own font family to ensure it’s unique and perfectly matches your brand’s personality and message.

Popular font combinations and their impact on branding

Finding the perfect brand fonts can be overwhelming if you lack inspiration.

If you’re feeling lost, here are popular font pairings that might help you get inspired:

1. Helvetica + Garamond:
   • Effect: This combination exudes modern simplicity (thanks to Helvetica) with a touch of classic elegance (from Garamond). It’s suitable for brands aiming for a timeless appeal.

2. Futura + Bodoni:

• Effect: Futura’s geometric shapes contrast nicely with Bodoni’s dramatic variance between thick and thin strokes. This pairing brings a mix of modernism with classic style, often conveying innovation and luxury.

3. Gill Sans + Baskerville:

• Effect: Gill Sans offers a clean and modern look, while Baskerville brings warmth and reliability. Together, they communicate professionalism with a touch of tradition.

4. Montserrat + Merriweather:

• Effect: Both are popular web fonts. Montserrat’s modern, geometric style pairs well with the slightly more traditional feel of Merriweather, creating a balance suitable for brands aiming for both innovation and trustworthiness.

5. Raleway + Roboto:

• Effect: These sans-serif fonts are both clean and modern. Their pairing is versatile and can suit tech companies or any brand aiming for a minimalist and contemporary look.

6. Playfair Display + Source Sans Pro:

• Effect: Playfair Display has a high contrast, distinctive style, which pairs well with the neutrality of Source Sans Pro. This combination often feels sophisticated and editorial, great for luxury brands or publications.

7. Oswald + Open Sans:

• Effect: Oswald, with its narrow and bold style, contrasts well with the neutral and friendly Open Sans. This combination feels modern and is often seen in digital or media-centric brands.

8. Arvo + Lato:

• Effect: The slab serif of Arvo provides a strong foundation, while Lato adds a sleek touch. The pairing is versatile and can convey both stability and modernity.

Remember, while these combinations are popular and have certain general effects, the ultimate impact of any font combination will depend on other branding elements like color, imagery, layout, and context.

If you don’t know how to choose your brand fonts and don’t feel creative, these options are a great place to start.

You will always be able to change your fonts at a later stage as your business evolves. And can always go for a unique combination of more modern fonts later on.

Final Thoughts

Although colors, images, and logos often dominate discussions on branding, do not neglect the power of typography to covey your brand’s personality.

Fonts are not mere letters on a page; they are the voice and tone of your brand.

From the timeless elegance of a classic serif to the unabashed boldness of modern sans-serif, typography speaks volumes.

Fonts evoke emotions, create associations and anchor a brand’s presence in your readers’ mind.

Just as the right word choice can elevate a conversation, choosing the right fonts can elevate your brand.

Typography is not just about being seen; it’s about being understood and remembered.

Because picking the right fonts for your brand will help you weave stories and sculpt perceptions one letter at a time.