Why typography matters more than you realise

When it comes to creating anything for your brand – a website, social media content, business stationery, advertising content – the written content matters greatly. It communicates your purpose, can help you connect with your target audience, and can be a huge component of your brand identity.

But something that often gets overlooked is just how important typography can be in shaping your brand identity. With fonts, good text formatting can be a subtle but powerful design element, but bad fonts will stick out like a sore, visually unappealing thumb. Bad fonts even have the power to transcend notoriety amongst designers and become a pop-culture phenomenon. For instance, 2009’s ‘Avatar’ famously used the Microsoft Word pre-set font ‘Papyrus’ for its opening titles and the gimmicky typeset of Comic Sans has become a shorthand for laughably bad graphic design.

But aside from giving a wide berth to Microsoft WordArt and Wingdings, what are the principles of typography that can help elevate your brand image?

1) Consistent styles

If you’ve ever flicked through magazines in a dentist waiting room, you may have picked up on how these publications have a limited, but carefully chosen, repertoire of fonts and text styles. They may have a font for headlines/key topics, the body text, and a secondary font for pull quotes (perhaps italicised or in bold for emphasis) – all of which work together to create an appealing page of text.

This is very much a question of quality over quantity; using a minimal amount of variation will always be more appealing than using a plethora of different fonts and styles.

2) Clarity

The worst thing that any font can be is hard to read. After all, how aesthetically pleasing a typeset can be is subjective, but readability is key to good typography. Typically this means placing headlines/key information in larger text, breaking up copy with similarly bold subheadings, and making sure that the main body text is not too small.

Using san-serif fonts for the main copy, making sure text has sufficient tracking (spacing between letters), and ensuring the appropriate use of kerning are all elements of typography that can be used to help visitors to your site get all the information they need.

3) Matching the rest of your aesthetic

Typography also needs to blend with the rest of the visual content. A website for a Saville Row tailor would simply look wrong if it used the same style of typography as a skate shop, for example. Of course, you can absolutely aim to break pre-existing moulds with your brand identity. But making sure that the text doesn’t look incongruent with photos and design assets on your website or social media content is another way that typography can really help strengthen your image.

When it comes to personalising your web design, your social media feeds, business stationery, or any other aspects of your brand image, we can help you create a consistent visual style to match your ideals and goals as a company.