Choosing Fonts Congruent With Your Brand Message
Fonts and typography, just like colors can communicate a lot about your brand. There are many different types of fonts, some are sophisticated and elegant, while others are bold or playful. Choosing fonts that clearly represent who you are, what you’re about, and the purpose you serve is important. You want to select your salt and collect your fonts with intent. You really want to establish your reason for choosing those particular fonts.
Guidelines For Selecting Your Fonts
You can select maybe two or three different brand fonts, one you may use only for specialty sort of graphics or specialty messaging, some you may use for headlines, and others you might use for body copy. There are serif fonts, sans-serif fonts, slab fonts, old fonts, minimalistic fonts, all types of different fonts. Now don’t go font crazy on me, some people, including myself at one point in time, think more is better and they want to choose a lot of different fonts, believing that they’re showing variety. By doing this they’re trying to appeal to a mass of different people and that’s not a good strategy. By trying to please everyone you typically please no one.
You can tell who an amateur is by looking at a business card and seeing on it about 20 different font faces. It doesn’t communicate a clear message of who this person is, it’s mixed up. You don’t want to send out the message that you’re mixed up, you want to send out a message that you’re clear and know who you are. So choose your fonts wisely and then be consistent with using them.
Consistency Is Key
You’re going to use your fonts on your website, promotional collateral, on social media posts, etc. make sure to use your fonts consistently. When you are consistent in telling your story and letting people know who you are, they’re going to better understand it. You’re going to build trust and that’s how you start building deep and meaningful relationships.
Take Action
Take a look at the fonts that you’re using for your graphics and imagery, make sure you know what they are and that you’re using them consistently. If you have a team that works with you and helps create your marketing materials, make sure that they also know the fonts to use and have them available.
Challenges You May Face
There will be times when you’re using programs that may not have the fonts available, in this case try to find fonts that are as close to the chosen font as possible and if you can’t find any fonts that are similar, consider choosing a different font to use. In personal branding it’s about consistency.
Don’t Forget Where The Term ‘Branding’ Came From
Do you recall where the term branding came from? It began with farmers who were in the field fighting one another over whose cows belonged to whom. Then, someone had the brilliant idea of putting a mark on their cows in order to distinguish them from the other farmers’ cattle. Soon enough every farmer had their own mark, their own brand that they put on their livestock which carried over in their products. They didn’t go around changing their brand for different cows and their personalities, they kept the brand consistent.
