When it comes to branding, logos and color palettes have a tendency to steal the spotlight. While we are definitely advocates for solid logo and design work here at CID, there is another aspect of establishing a brand identity that we believe is just as important: fonts.
Whether they’re evoking emotion, conveying personality, or establishing authority and expertise, your font choices say much more about your brand and your business than you may realize. By understanding what makes fonts so impactful, we can ensure that we’re choosing ones that truly represent and reinforce your brand’s unique values, characteristics, and identity.
The Psychology of Fonts
Fonts can be used to communicate a wealth of information to our audiences. And, whether that information is gathered intentionally or subconsciously, it actively shapes a reader’s assumptions and perceptions about a brand.
Every font has a distinctive personality and purpose, and each has the potential to elicit specific emotions, moods, or associations from a reader. Here are a few examples:
Simple, sensible, and straightforward; Serif fonts are by far some of the most neutral and reader-friendly. As a result, they can communicate a sense of stability, formality, or traditionality to a reader.
Modernized fonts and display fonts are attention-grabbers by design. They are distinct, prominent, and eccentric, which means they are great choices for communicating a brand’s forward-thinking, quirky, or intentionally unconventional qualities.
There is little chance of ignoring a message when it is in a headline font style. Bold, black, heavy fonts communicate a sense of dominance, importance, and significance. When used properly, they can help convey a brand’s reputable expertise and authority, highlight the seriousness of a particular idea or concept, or add a sense of urgency to a call to action.
The actual psychology behind font preferences and the science of typography design can be rather complex, but, the most important thing to remember is that fonts are powerful and effective tools when it comes to making an audience feel a certain way about your message, your mission, and your brand as a whole.
Choosing the Best Font for Your Brand
If your brand is your identity, then your font is your handwriting. It’s one of the most effective and consistent ways to communicate your tone, voice, and personality across all of your platforms. Consequently, choosing the right font for your brand means taking all of these factors into consideration.
If you’re not sure where to start, here are a few simple steps to simplify your search:
STEP 1: Define Your Key Brand Characteristics
The best place to start is usually with what you already know. So, when it comes to choosing a font for your brand, we recommend starting with what you know best: you! It can be helpful to outline and define your brand’s key characteristics so that you can choose a font that best represents them. Is your brand practical, passionate, or poised? Choose a font that communicates those qualities to your audiences.
STEP 2: Establish Your Tone
Sometimes the best font choice is the one that most closely matches your desired tone. If you are looking to establish trust or authority with your readers, then you’ll want to choose a more practical, neutral, or professional font. However, if you’re trying to communicate that your brand is fun, casual, or playful, then you’ll probably want to peruse some more modernized or display-type fonts. Whatever your message is, your font should be used to communicate the mood or emotion behind it.
STEP 3: Show Off Your Personality
Font choices are incredibly important and impactful aspects of your brand identity, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t personalize them. Diversifying your font library with bold, modern, and other stylized variations of your primary fonts will expand the range of your brand by giving you more options to strategically employ. Establishing a handful of approved variations right away will make it much easier for you and your teams to get creative while maintaining a consistent brand presence across all platforms.
Are you looking for help with brand creation, development, or awareness? You can get all that and help choosing the best font for your brand from CID. Contact us to get started!
"Bring in the Klinkhammer," they said...and we did! Amy is part of our award-winning marketing & strategy team where she writes for ads, email, the web, video and so much more. She also drinks too much coffee and spends too much time debating the Oxford comma.