Choosing the perfect font to represent your brand can be harder than choosing the right thing to watch on Netflix, so what’s the first step?
Step 1: Know Yourself
Before you choose a font, it’s important to have a solid understanding of your brand’s identity.
Every brand has a personality. Coming up with a few adjectives that describe your business’s character is a great place to start:
- Bold
- Helpful
- Caring
- Serious
- Adventurous
- Imaginative
- Youthful
- Playful
- Vibrant
- Energetic
- Reliable
- Whimsical
- Masculine
- Feminine
- Innovative
- Calm
- Luxurious
- Elegant
- Humorous
- Glamorous
- Healthy
- Old-Fashioned
- Kind
- Light-hearted
- Witty
- Tough
- Sexy
- Authoritative
- Quirky
- Smart
Step 2: Font Psychology
Fonts are broken up into different categories with different aesthetic traits. This is known as “Font Psychology.” Review each font classification and see which one fits your brand most appropriately.
- Serif: Classic, traditional, elegant
- Sans-Serif: Clean, modern, minimalistic
- Slab-Serif: Strong and adventurous
- Script: Chic and exclusive
- Handwritten: Creative and Informal
- Decorative: Unique and stylized
Step 3: Licensing
Not all fonts are free, so it’s important to figure out how you will source your fonts before making the final decision.
Free font resources:
These resources may be free, but free resources usually lack diversity in weight throughout the font family.
Paid font resources:
Paid fonts give you more versatility with your designs in that they offer fonts that have a variety of weights (thin, book, normal, semi bold, bold, and black).
Step 4: Find a pairing
Now that we have identified our font classification, it’s time to mix and match. Having a secondary font option can help with visual hierarchy and diversify your brand’s look.
Always make sure to test your font pairings out in real situations to ensure they work well. Don’t forget to make sure your font licensing is covered in all implementations (websites, packaging, print, etc.)