It’s More Than An Aesthetic, It’s Awareness.
3 Ways Your Font Choice Is Holding You Back
Helvetica is a typeface, Helvetica Bold is a font, and Papyrus is an abomination—unless it isn’t, unless it hit the right mark. Art is subjective, and design is objective to your audience. To think strategically about design, consider how “appropriate” it is. "How will my audience receive this?” “Is it faithful to my business?” because the brand needs to accurately represent the business.
Today, I want to touch on three main points called “Type Rules.” The best part is that they are geared to helping you understand fonts in a way that will make you more informed, and, in turn, help you better inform your buyers.
It Must Be legible
Okay, this is the first rule: if the most used typeface in your branding is not legible to your audience, I don’t care how much you like it. You need to remove it from your style guide.
“But like… than’s like your opinion, man…”
Nope, it’s your audiences, and they are ditching your sales pages because they can’t decide what’s next. I cannot emphasize this enough, because I have met so many creative leaders with copy that rocks!
If you can get me excited about anything, making my heart move, you’ve nailed your copy. But if it is not ordered properly, if it does not direct them as it should. You have fallen short of yourself if this design element does not lead them, because at the end of the day, if creative work does not have a clear outcome, it is simply “pretty” but useless.
Aesthetics ARE Important
Helvetica rocks, but for a food truck… nah, it would suck. If it doesn't have an objective, there is no point in making it subjective.
I will look at my fonts. For example, I chose Roboto as my primary font because it is available on different platforms, easy to read, and supported by Squarespace when I built my website.
I chose Voltage as a flourish because it was also available on Squarespace. It also aligned with the dynamic brand I was building.
They Will Understand
Okay… not everyone who sees your fonts and other areas of your brand identity will get it. If you did branding right, if the strategy was solid and the story was grounded in real human experiences, the right people will be like: “I see what you did here!”
Moral of the story: the right people will understand your brand with little involvement on your part. The downside is that audiences are not made in labs; they exist in rooms, and they have real problems, a problem that typeface alone cannot fix.
Recap:
Make your fonts legible: if they can’t read it, it’s failed it’s first purpose.
Aesthetics paired with strategy make for visuals that are magnetic.
The right people will resonate with are doing, so rely on your copy.
