What You Need to Know About Choosing a Font for Your Brand

The fonts you choose for your brand play a huge role in your brand strategy. It impacts your brand recognition – unique fonts stand out from the competition and help people associate that font with your brand. Choosing a font for your brand is a bigger deal than finding something pretty on Canva.

We’re giving you a sneak peek into the things we consider when creating and customizing your brand identity. We also threw in some fun fonts we’ve been playing with for our clients lately!

Why Do Fonts Matter?

Think of how much your business communicates online. Even if you’re a brick-and-mortar business, you have a website, a social media presence, and maybe you send emails. You communicate with your potential clients all the time. And switching up fonts on them will be so confusing. It results in a perceived lack of professionalism.

Staying consistent with your fonts and branding can improve brand recognition and awareness. The right font can convey the brand’s personality and values before someone reads one word. Don’t underestimate the visual representation of your brand.

Fonts can help you stand out from your competitors, too. You’re creating a visual identity that sets you apart from others in your industry and captures the attention of potential clients.

Did you know having a strong brand can improve your SEO? Your brand improves page experience, which is a ranking factor. An easy-to-navigate design encourages people to spend more time on your website, which search engines want to see!

Fonts are a significant part of your brand. Be strategic about choosing a font for your brand and consider what it conveys about your brand. 

Types of Fonts

Fonts can evoke certain emotions or feelings, influencing how people perceive a brand. A warm and inviting font may evoke feelings of comfort and trust, while a bold and assertive font can convey confidence and strength.

When choosing a font for your brand, we use a mix of these fonts:

• Serif: These fonts are often perceived as traditional, formal, and authoritative. 
• Sans-Serif: This gives off a cleaner and more modern look. They are often associated with simplicity, minimalism, and readability.
• Script: Script fonts mimic cursive handwriting and are often viewed as elegant and sophisticated. 
• Display: Display fonts are designed to be attention-grabbing and impactful. They come in a wide range of styles, from playful and quirky to bold and decorative.
• Monospaced: Each character occupies the same amount of horizontal space, giving them a uniform appearance.
• Handwritten: These mimic the look of handwriting, adding a personal and informal touch to designs.
• Decorative: This is where Court’s creativity shines. Decorative fonts are highly stylized where visual impact is prioritized over readability.

Each font type serves a different purpose. Serif, Monospaced, and Sans-Serif fonts are your paragraph fonts because they are easy to read. Script, Handwritten, and Decorative fonts add a fun element to your brand and stand out on your website. Display fonts are typically headers because they grab your attention.

Not every brand needs each of these types of fonts. More serious brands might want to skip script or decorative fonts because they clash with their brand identity. 

Use this guide to DIY your brand!

5 Tips to Choose the Right Font For Your Business

1. Sourcing the right font takes a long time.

This might be one of the hardest parts of branding – finding the perfect font for your vision. This is why one of the first steps of our branding process is mood board creation. It helps us narrow in on a font style you like before starting that sourcing process. 

2. The legal stuff is extra important.

Fonts aren’t free. They are products of creators, and you need the proper license to use them. Whether it’s on print, your website, or just social media — you always need to buy the license. 

And because we know you are curious — for Duo, we always buy one font license per client. Sometimes that means we buy the same font multiple times, especially for those secondary fonts. We include $50-$100 of assets in every brand package, meaning we source the correct license for you, so you don’t have to worry about copyright infringements. 

You can thank our agency background for being extra safe here. 😅 That process was a nightmare when working with big brands like Clorox. 

3. Consistency matters.

Once you have your brand fonts, you should be using those fonts and only those fonts across everything— social graphics, printed collateral, your website, etc. 

Yes, Canva has some really fun and playful fonts, but the more fonts you use, the more watered down your brand will look and the less recognizable you’ll be. Don’t water down your brand!

4. Fonts can be manipulated (by the experts, of course).

This is where Courtney goes from brand designer to brand wizard. Sometimes we will find a font but hate the letter “P”. Well, a really good designer can fix that for you. This is where a brand font can become truly custom for you.  

5. Legibility matters.

We love sourcing script fonts or more playful fonts to incorporate a little variety into brand kits. But testing this out is extremely important. A font can look beautiful on a brand board, but when applied to your website or a collateral item like a Canva presentation… well it sometimes doesn’t read so well. 

So what do you think? Did you learn anything new today about the world of fonts? If you don’t have a design eye, we know it can feel overwhelming when there are SO many fonts to pick from. If you’re ready to have a brand that conveys your personality and values, connect with us about our branding services! With each of our packages, we are committed to equipping you with the essential tools (fonts included!) to make a lasting impact on your audience. Contact us today!