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In this email:

• 📝 Design Tip + Exercise: Choosing Complementary Typography
• 🌈 Something Fun: The Importance of Play (videos)!

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Hello, Friends!

I’ve been seeing a lot of interesting font choices flowing through the graphics popping up in my social media feeds. It’s clear DIY social media creation packs, apps, and software available to help small biz owners create pre-designed templated posts are getting a lot of use. And I’m all for it! If you can do it on your own and save some money, why not, right?!

But what if I told you that using the cool, illustrative font options included in those apps might actually hurt your brand recognition and engagement? Knowing what fonts to use and stick to in your branding is key. And understanding what qualifies as complementary to your established branding is imperative.

So for this email, I’ve put together a Design Tip + Exercise that'll help point you in the right direction. 🥳 Specifically around choosing complementary typography for your brand identity.

First, let's call out the biggest issues:

• Being led astray with uninformed, fanciful fonts.
• Illegibility for smaller image areas and longer lines of text.
• General accessibility issues.

It’s easy to become enamored with stylish and intricate options. Fonts are FUN! But just because they’re attractive, are they the best choice for your business purposes or your readers? Believe it or not, your typography says heaps about your business and, as with any brand elements you choose, should be accessible while also aligning with its messaging.

Try the following exercise:

This visualization will help get you started in choosing the appropriate fonts for your business:

1. Open up your preferred word processing app and create a new document (IE: Word, Pages, Google Docs, etc. Most any word processing application will do.)
2. Place your main logo file into the document. Placement isn’t super important, but if you’d like a bit more direction, go ahead and put it at the top center for convenience. Make it about the size of a logo in letterhead (1-2 inches wide to scale).
3. Add the following copy:
   1. “Headline here” and make it 28 point.
   2. “Subheader to go here” and make it 16 point.
   3. Add a paragraph of Lorem Ipsum (dummy/placeholder text) and make it 10 point text.
4. Next, begin to experiment and play! Assign a font for each section that is complementary to your wordmark. These could be a font family or fonts from separate families. As long as they work together and are legible.

Tips and tricks:

• Avoid the mistake of assuming that the font used in the creation of your logo’s wordmark is a good idea for your brand fonts.
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  In some cases, this can work. But most times, you're better off choosing fonts designed for readability and accessability. If your wordmark is in a handwritten style, reader-friendly sans serif or serif fonts for body copy is a great starting point. Start with popular options to see how things feel: Helvetica, Times New Roman, Georgia, Ariel, Palatino, Verdana.
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  Yes, these are standard fonts that are likely pre-installed on your machine, but they’re a great jump off to see what basic styles speak to your brand. Depending on the vibe you’re going for you could choose either.
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• Once style is established, you can further explore via font sites like Google Fonts (for open source fonts that are usually* free to use commercially) or on paid sites like MyFonts.com for options that may be a bit more recognizable as they require licensed use (meaning they aren’t seen as much due to licensing requirements - free options are very popular and used much more from brand to brand - so paid fonts have a bit more stand-out appeal). Another place to play would, of course, be in your DIY graphic making software. Just don’t get carried away or tempted by the more illustrative fonts they showcase.
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• I won’t get into the logistics of font licenses in this email, but whichever fonts you use, be sure you have the correct licenses for the users in your company responsible for creating your marketing imagery and company collateral (*hint: many “free” fonts are only free for personal use. You’ll need a license to use them for commercial purposes).
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• Play with serif, slab serif, and sans serif combinations. Example: see my site. My brand fonts are a mixture of Montserrat (sans serif) and Libre Baskerville (serif). They work nicely together in terms of style, weight, and balance. They are also clearly legible throughout all of my materials and convey my business’s personality and messaging well.
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• Think about the basic vibe of your brand and choose fonts that confirm it. Is your business serious and professional? Serif fonts are a typical choice to convey this mood. For example, using a traditional serif font can subconsciously give the reader feelings of elegance and trustworthiness. This isn't to say you can’t achieve similar feelings with sans serif fonts or that serif can’t be used outside of these categories. But in general, sans serif are used for their clean and modern design.
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  Whichever you use, they should be strategically informed, at least minimally, by the vibe you aim to convey.
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• Stay away from headline, handwritten, and script fonts for your body copy. Your body copy needs to be legible and there are fonts designed specifically for this purpose. Stylized, headline fonts will limit you in use. They are reserved for one-three word titles that you might see on a more illustrative concert poster, for example.
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  This last point is what I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. In particular, ultra stylized, mid-century modern, poster style fonts being used for subheader and/or body text. Eeep!
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  I'm talking about healthcare providers or financial institutions sharing images about a serious workshop they're hosting using 50s/60s styled Woodstock lettering. 🤦🏻‍♀️ In these unfortunate cases, messaging and branding guidelines have gone completely out the window (or worse, haven't been established on the front end) hurting their identity, engagement, and brand recognition in the long run.

There’s much more that goes into selecting brand fonts, and if you’d like professional assistance, I’d be happy to discuss what that looks like with you.

For those DIYing, the exercise and tips above will give you a good starting point to begin exploring. If you need a bit more guidance on various aspects of developing your visual brand identity, my eBook, Logo To Go is a good next step.

If you've been in business for 1-2+ years and would like insight on what's done well and what could use some attention, I've got you covered! One of my Light Brand Identity Audits is just what you need.

A note about accessibility: It’s important to ensure your copy is legible to everyone. I could write an entire article on accessibility and what that means in terms of visuals, but because I’m only touching on it in this article, I urge you to do more research if you are planning on DIYing your visual brand identity.

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🌈Something Fun:
The importance of play!

In the past few months, I’ve integrated a bit more creative playtime and exploration into my day-to-day. For more on that journey, read this archived email of my ever evolving relationship with art. As to where I am now in that process, I thought I’d share two little videos showcasing a new practice I've integrated into my days.

Using Adobe Fresco, I put down random blobs of color with a watercolor brush. Next, I create doodles of what I see in those blobs. There are no rules. It can be abstract or realistic. Whatever comes to mind (see weird cyclops-esque dog eating a taco)! Here are my first two attempts:

A fun way to spend an hour or so if you’re into that sort of thing. If you try it out, I’d love to see what you create!

Big thanks to my IG friend, @grooveva, who inspired me with this exercise.

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Thinking about updating your business's Brand Identity?

Interested in working with me in the new year? If your business is in the market for either a new Visual Brand Identity or an updated or refreshed identity, project bookings are open and available for 2023! Reply to this email to start the conversation or book your complimentary 30-minute consultation if you're ready to learn more about the process.

If you’re not quite sure what your business needs in terms of its Visual Brand Identity, my Light Brand Identity Audits are for you! Check out the packages available and book yours today!

And if you’re feeling creative and want to try your hand at creating your own Visual Brand Identity. I’ve got your back! Read Logo-To-Go for tips and tricks as well as what you’ll need to know (that you may not have considered) when you tackle your project.

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Finding more time for play,

Nicola

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