Typography is most of the brand
Take away the logo and the colours from most brands and you are left with words on a screen. Headlines, product names, buttons, invoices and help articles: typography does the heavy lifting in every one of them. That is why we spend more time choosing type than on almost any other decision in an identity project.
A good brand typeface is not the most beautiful one in the catalogue. It is the one that sounds like the company and keeps working when it is set at twelve pixels in a table on a cheap laptop.
Start with the voice
Before we look at fonts, we describe how the brand should sound. Precise or warm? Quiet or assertive? Contemporary or rooted in a tradition? Those words narrow the search quickly. A geometric sans says something different from a humanist one, and a sharp serif feels different from a soft, rounded one, even before anyone reads the text.
We then test shortlisted typefaces with real content, never with lorem ipsum. Long product names, prices with decimals, a dense paragraph of legal copy and a single word headline tell you more about a typeface than any specimen.
Two families are usually enough
Most of the identities we design use two typefaces at most: one with character for display and one built for reading. Often it is a single family used with discipline. Every extra typeface adds licensing, loading time and decisions for the team, and very rarely adds clarity.
What creates variety is not more fonts but a clear scale. We define a small set of styles, each with its size, line height, letter spacing and weight, and give them names the team can use: display, title, heading, body, label. When a designer or developer needs text, they pick a style, not a font size.
Check the details that break
A typeface can look perfect in a headline and fall apart in use. We check a list of details before committing:
- Numerals. Are there tabular figures for prices and tables?
- Languages. Does it cover the accents and scripts the business needs?
- Weights. Is there a weight that holds up in small, light-on-dark text?
- Web performance. Is a variable version available, and how heavy are the files?
- Licensing. Does the licence cover web, apps, print and advertising at the scale the company will need?
Let it age well
Trendy typefaces date quickly. We favour typefaces with a long history of use or a clear design rationale, and we let the layout, colour and photography carry the trends. That way the brand can evolve around its typography for years without starting again.
