How to find the right font for your brand: the perfect choosing guide
Building a brand identity isn’t an easy task and can sometimes be quite overwhelming. You need to think about a lot of details, such as the message you want to send to your audience, creating brand materials, picking your corporate colors, and much more.
This leads us to the big question — how to pick a font for your brand?
The basic tips are that your brand fonts should:
- Be legible and distinctive
- Work on every format and platform
- Communicate your brand’s personality
But there’s much more you should know. So, we’re here to help you find the perfect font or font combination for your brand image. In this guide, you’ll learn how typographies work, how to mix them together, and, of course, how to choose the right one for your brand. Let’s get started!
Understanding the types of fonts and their classifications
Before choosing a font, it’s interesting to understand how they are created and how they work. There are many types of fonts and each one has its own styling and meaning. Knowing a bit more about them will make it much easier to pick the right one for your brand.
These are the main font types, each of them unique and different in expressing a brand. Let’s have a deeper look.
Serif Fonts
The Serif Fonts are those that have serifs in their design. Quite obvious but, what are those? Serifs are simply extra strokes on the endings, which embellish the basic structure of a letter.
Due to their design, these typographies are known for being classic and reliable, as we can see in the logo down below.
Many acclaimed companies, such as Prada, Vogue, or Rolex use this type of font on their brand design to evoke a classic touch and combine it with a sense of big reputation. So they may be the perfect option for traditional businesses, that want to send a message of trustworthiness to their audiences.
Here are some Serif Fonts examples:
- Courier
- Baskerville
- Garamond
Sans Serif Fonts
“Sans” means “without”, so it’s easy to imagine Sans Serif Fonts are those which don’t have the extra strokes on their designs. These emerged during the 19th century, which helps to sense a modern and present style.
Thanks to their simpler design, Sans Serif Fonts provide a clean and contemporary look, and it’s one of the most used fonts to create minimalist layouts. With these typefaces, you’ll be able to achieve an effortlessly polished brand image.
Google and Spotify are two of the main brands that have a Sans Serif Font on their logo since they want to have a young and modern identity. If your business is trying to reach a younger audience, this can be the perfect option for you. Send a message of trendiness and simplicity from the very beginning.
Here are some Sans Serif Fonts examples:
- Nova Flat
- Open Sans
- Public Sans
Script Fonts
Imagine having a typeface imitating cursive handwriting, achieving an unrepeatable identity for your brand. That’s exactly what you can have with the Script Fonts. They have an elegant look and character strokes that help connect one letter to the next, creating the perfect dance illusion for a graceful brand.
Script Fonts display a classic and luxurious look, which can perfectly fit with brands that want to target a more exclusive audience.
Some of the most important brands using these fonts are Cadillac and Instagram. These can be the perfect typefaces for brands that want to showcase a smart and in-vogue image.
Here are some Script Fonts examples:
- Alex Brush
- Pacifico
- Great Vibes
Decorative Fonts
Having one of a kind business shouldn’t be a problem when it comes to your brand identity. So, if it doesn’t fit in any particular style, Decorative Fonts are the best solution for you. Build for certain purposes or even for a festive occasion, these types of fonts are normally used for promotional purposes.
Different or especially memorable companies, such as Disney or IBM also use Decorative Fonts. So these are custom-made type designs to highlight your brand and send a youthful and unique message to your customers.
Here are some Decorative Fonts examples:
- Cinzel Decorative
- Press Start 2P
- Monoton
Free vs Paid Custom-Made Fonts: Pros and Cons
Now that you have a bigger knowledge of this topic, you may know there are many ways to get the perfect fonts for your business — you can find thousands of them for free online, discover paid ones or create your own. All these options are valid depending on what you’re seeking to communicate with your brand.
Since we know all this can be a huge headache, we’ve collected the pros and cons of each possibility. So let’s dive in and understand what’s the best solution for you.
Free Fonts
If you’re starting with your project, or you run a small business with limited means, free fonts might be key. You can find a huge variety of free resources with open licenses on platforms such as Freepik Fonts or Google Fonts that will provide unlimited combinations and still manage to be high-quality.
Main pros:
- They’re free!
- A wide variety can be found online
- They usually come in high-quality
Main cons:
- They aren’t unique and custom-made for your brand
- Some fonts may not come in all weights
- They’re most frequently used in personal projects
Paid Fonts — Designing a Custom Font
Custom-made fonts are always a better choice for a brand that is looking for uniqueness and a higher-quality result. Paying a professional designer to develop this item for your brand should be your preferred option in case you have a budget.
Main pros:
- Exclusive and custom-made fonts for you
- Higher quality
- No copyright issues
Main cons:
- Can cost very expensive
- Extra modifications are paid aside
- Price may depend on usage
5 Tips your Brand Font Should Comply With
Every start-up, project, or small business has its own strengths and needs, so your brand font should also be appropriate for them. In this section, we’re sharing with you the best practices to pick a typeface that completely suits your branding and identity.
1. Your Brand Fonts must Match your Branding Personality
We’ve been mentioning the term “brand identity”, giving some branding tips, and speaking about the message you should send to your audience throughout this post. But, what does that exactly mean?
A brand’s personality is determined by many important factors, and it also depends on what type of business you’re running. You should be able to answer these questions in order to have a complete understanding of your brand:
- What three words would you use to describe your business?
- How do you want people to know your brand?
- How are you going to make a difference in the industry?
Your brand’s fonts should communicate the same information you define previously. It’s not the same to be head of a Spa or of a Real Estate company. The first business would probably need a more elegant and youthful typeface in order to attract a certain audience, while the second one will for sure pick a more professional and bold one, communicating confidence and expertise.
2. Choose Flexible Brand Fonts
Your font won’t only appear on your logo. So, when it comes to picking the right font, another very important aspect you should take into consideration is how the typographies are going to adapt to your online and offline marketing.
Layouts such as flyers, posters, brochures, or menus are part of your identity and your font should be able to perfectly adjust in size and shape. These documents can be used online, or they can be printed for any offline strategy. So we recommend choosing legible fonts that can easily change their size.
3. Make Sure your Fonts are Legible
We already understand our brand, and we’ve picked a flexible font. Now it’s time to make sure your choice is 100% legible or your Small Business won’t be able to achieve the right identity. But, how can we make sure our fonts combination will be easy to read on any layout and size?
- Avoid excessive ornaments. It’s nice to have a different font and make your brand recognizable at just a glance. But people need to read what you’re sharing with them. It’s truly important to make sure your letters don’t get confused or even worse — they create a new word completely different from what you meant.
- Good space between the letters. This is probably one of the things that will highly increase your font’s legibility. Good kerning —this is what the space between letters is called— helps your audience to easily read and understand your message. And this is very good since users nowadays get tired very fast of unclear promotions. For a deeper dive into the art of kerning, be sure to explore this detailed post that uncovers essential techniques for achieving optimal kerning and typography refinement.
- Try to pick a familiar font. Picking a well-known font or one close to them will attract people’s attention because they have already seen it before. Your audience will immediately have a feeling of proximity to your brand. Although, you should try and choose a not-very-famous typeface, or it may pass by.
4. Choose Fonts with Multiple Weights
To help your readers follow your texts, it’s important to pick fonts that have multiple weights. Meaning they have the option to be thin, regular, bold, cursive, and much more. The weight of the font will help you to highlight headers or to make visual combinations stand out.
This feature should be a priority when developing your branding. So make sure your typography counts with several weights before falling in love with it.
5. Create a Contrast Between your Brand Fonts
One good exercise you should do when picking your fonts is to create mockups with different combinations and see which ones work better. By doing this, you’ll achieve contrast between the fonts and the final result will be much more attractive to your customers.
If you don’t have the means to do so, don’t worry because we bring you a couple of examples to see how this kind of blending works.
Choosing the Right Font for your Brand — Final Word
We’ve shared with you the main tips on how to pick the perfect font or typeface combination for your brand. Here’s a little summary as a friendly reminder:
- Make sure you define your brand identity correctly.
- Pick a legible font with several weights.
- Choose a font that speaks for your business.
- Set the correct kerning or letter spacing.
- Ensure your typographies work together on different layouts.
And remember, at Wepik we offer an online graphic design editor with thousands of editable free templates to create great branding for your small business, start-up, or any kind of project. Starting is up to you!
