Fonts play a HUGE role in your brands visual identity. It’s super important that you use fonts that reflect your business and convey the right message to your audience. That’s the beauty of typography – it does just that!
When working with a professional designer, you can be sure that a lot of love and time is spent looking into what fonts match your brand and the emotions your audience will feel when they see them. However, I also understand that hiring a designer may not always be an option, especially for a new business owner.
There are so many fonts out there. They are being created every day and trends come and go all the time. It’s important to choose fonts that a) you won’t get bored of and b) that perfectly reflect your brand.
So, let’s cut to the chase – how do you go about choosing a font? Below are three ways to help you:
1. First things first, what are the traits of your brand?
Before you can begin choosing fonts that represent your brand, you have to identify the traits you’d like to be represented.
The way to identify these traits is to think of adjectives that describe how you want your brand to come across, look and feel. For example, the traits of a brand like Si J’etais is romantic, stylish and elegant. Therefore, we worked on choosing fonts that represented this. We stayed clear of fonts that came across as bold, energetic or ornate for example, as this wouldn’t match with the elegant, feminine brand.
2. Choose 2-3 fonts in total and stick with it
I would recommend choosing one to two fonts for your headers and a second font for your body copy. If it makes sense for your brand to incorporate a decorative script font, I highly recommend that it is used sparingly, as an accent font. As your brand grows and evolves over time (and trends change) you can easily swap out an accent font without needing to rebrand or make changes to all of your materials.
3. Think: what fonts compliment your logo
Rather than repeating the same font that is used in your logo, try to choose fonts that complement it instead. By doing this, this gives your logo an opportunity to stand apart as its own entity and in turn will build brand recognition. This is true especially if your logo is your name written in a font (a wordmark). By choosing a set of brand fonts, it will help you to create hierarchy on your website and marketing materials and allow your logo to stand strong on its own.
Here are three (free) Google font pairings that will elevate your brand and make you look like a pro:
