Creating brand is an important part in any business development. However, building a brand is not always easy. You have to come up with a design that is distinctive and unique enough that make it memorable, but also still represent your business well. Therefore, building a brand identity often takes a lot time before you finally found the perfect one for your business.
In brand identity building, all aspects of design such as logo, business card, colors, and branding fonts have to be unified with similar style and identity to represent your brand. It also has to tell a story that makes your audience feel related to. This is important in building brand identity to attract the right audience.
Tips on How to Pick Branding Fonts
The perfect brand should be unique and memorable, legible, flexible enough to work on every platform, and able to communicate the personality of your brand. Therefore, selecting branding fonts sometimes can be a daunting task too.
To help you ease your mind when choosing fonts for your brand, here are 5 tips that can help you get started.
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Understand Your Brand Personality
Whatever your brand is, you need a clear and well-defined brand personality. It will help your customers relate and connect to your brand. Therefore, your brand will always be on top of their mind and be the first one to pick when they need your products or services. This is how you improve your audience’s brand awareness.
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All components such as branding fonts, color scheme, logo design, and brand voice should communicate the personality that you want to show. If you think the brand personality is still not clear enough, take some time to think about how you want the customers see your brand.
It may take some time to find out your brand personality. If you’re unsure how, you can also work with your stake holders to create it. Once you know your brand personality, you can move to the next tips on choosing the right font that represent the brand.
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Understand the Personality Traits behind Each Font Category
If you are only designing occasionally, you might not be familiar with font categories. However, understand font categories is a great way to start when you want to find the perfect fonts for your brand.
Font categories are important to help designers identify, choose, and pair the fonts. Each of them also has different and unique traits. When you understand these, you can narrow down your choices and it will be easier for you to find the right font.
There are six font classifications, they are Serif, Sans-serif, Slab serif, Script, Handwritten, and Decorative. Serif is originated back in the 15th century and perceived as traditional, classic, and trustworthy. Some famous brand that use this style as their branding fonts are Time, Vogue, and Tiffany&Co.
The next category is Sans-serif, which emerges in the 19th century. This font category has a simple and minimalist design, which often make them perceived as modern. Many top tech companies use this type of fonts as their logo, such as Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Spotify.
Then we have Slab serif fonts that tend to look more rugged, bold, and quirky. This type of fonts are often used by companies with proven quality products throughout history. Some of the brands using this font category are Honda, Sony, and Volvo.
Script fonts give off and elegant feel due to its beautiful cursive handwriting style. This font category tend to be very distinctive. Brands that use this category as their branding fonts often follow the design trend. However, it is also a Risky choice since it can get out of fashion quickly. Brands that use this font category includes Cadillac, Instagram, Johnson&Johnson, and Ford.
Handwritten fonts are just like its name suggest, just like it is written out by hand. This font category is perfect for brand that want to be perceived as fun, approachable, playful, and artistic.
The last category is decorative that offer a unique and dramatic look. It is highly stylized and looks powerful. Some brands using this font category includes Disney, IBM, and Lego.
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Consider Your Budget
There are plenty of fonts available online both paid and free ones. Before you start choosing fonts, you need to consider the budget you have and whether you are going to go for the paid or free one.
The free site do offer plenty of fonts, but they tend to be limited. Therefore, it can be difficult to get font families in different font weights and styles. On the other hand, the paid library can offer a lot more options for you to choose from. However, purchasing the paid ones can be expensive. That is because most of them charge individual fees for each font license type.
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Find Fonts That Represent Your Brand Personality
Now you know your brand personality and the characters of each fonts. The next step is finding fonts that match your brand personality. While there are font categories mentioned above may help you figure out what to look for, you should know that each category has plenty of style variation.
This variation impacts on the vibe and look of each font. Therefore, you need to be mindful when pairing fonts, since it will impact on the overall look of your design. These are some example font pairing options that you can try for different personalities:
- Approachable yet trustworthy: pair bold serif header with nondescript sans-serif sub header
- Modern, professional and corporate: use a single minimal sans-serif font
- Elegant and high-end: choose thin and stylized sans-serif font
- Youthful and friendly: choose think and rounded sans-serif
- Conservative and trustworthy: Choose single traditional serif font.
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3 Basic Requirements for Branding Fonts
Now you know everything about brand personality and how to find fonts that match. The final things you should know is make sure that your branding fonts meet 3 basic requirements.
The first requirement is that your font must be flexible. Branding fonts will be used in a variety of medium, therefore, you need to make sure that the fonts work well on any of them. You may also need to check the proper licenses for each use, especially if you are planning to use them in various ways, such as packaging, blog, external presentation, social media, and so on.
To make sure that your fonts will look good on any media, you will need to create a mock up designs for each purpose. This way you will be able to easily see if the fonts look good or not on each of them.
The second requirement is that your fonts should have multiple font weights. This is important to create a clear text hierarchy so that you can easily differentiate headers, sub headers, body text, callouts, and quotes. These font weights are equally important whether you are going to use them on printed or online media.
The third and the last requirement is legible. It is easy to find fancy and beautiful font design. However, before you experiment with all of these beautiful fonts, make sure that the fonts will be easy to read. Whether it is uppercase, lowercase, large, small, number, or letters, each of them should be easy to read in any style.
You can be as creative as you want, and the branding fonts that you use on the headers doesn’t have to be as legible as the rest of the copy. However, it still need to be easy to read and understand at a glance. You don’t want your audience stuck trying to figure out what your brand is saying.
7 Cool Branding Fonts Example You Should Try
Now you know all the tips you need to find branding fonts that match your brand personality. The next step is exploring the internet to find one that perfectly represent your brand. It might be a little bit overwhelming, however, considering tons of options available for you to choose from.
To spare you the time searching and exploring, here are some cool fonts that you should try for your brand design.
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Mevistalava
If you are looking for a sleek and fancy design, then you should try Mevistalava by Pollux of Germinorum. This original and creative font is perfect for branding purpose, whether you are going to use it for marketing material, promotion, or as a logotype.
This font already includes all elements that you need in a font, such as uppercase, lowercase, alternates, and ligatures. It also supports multi languages, so you can use it for any languages you need.
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The Bravery
Next, we have The Bravery, an allcaps font with classic style. This is the right choice if you are looking for an elegant looking font. The bonus ornaments included in this font package is also useful if you are going for a fancy design style. It has OpenType features with Stylistic Alternates and Swash.
To use the alternate glyphs, make sure you are using a design software that support the OpenType features such as Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator. With Multi language glyphs, you can use this font easily in any languages.
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The Restaurant
Just like its name suggest, this font is perfect for a restaurant logo. This serif fonts comes with beautiful design that creates a fancy and high-end vibes. Don’t worry about its flexibility because this font will also look great in any media such as banner, video content, social media, and so on.
The Restaurant already include lowercase, uppercase, and alternate options. It also supports multi languages and PUA encoded for easier use even.
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The Winchestera
Here is another elegant and stylish font for a great branding fonts. The stylish look will be perfect for a fancy and luxurious brand. The Winchestra is eye catching and will look beautiful on any media such as social media posts and on product packaging.
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Kid Tribe
If your brand is focused on children’s product or services, then you should try consider this Kid Tribe. This one is neat and simple, therefore making it really easy to read at a glance. The cheerful and playful tone is perfect for anything children related.
This font comes in two different formats, .otf and .ttf. Therefore, you won’t have a hard time working with this cute and fun font.
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Klefont Mooncrat
Klefont Mooncrat is a playful name for an Indonesian traditional snack called Klepon. It is delightful lettering and casual style is perfect for a snack or culinary product brand. This font is easily adaptable for any type of design. Therefore, you can use it for any purpose and any media that you need such as social media, product packaging, website font, and so on.
It already includes alternate characters and ligature. This way, you can easily personalize this font to match your brand personality.
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Bobaniac
Last but not least is Bobaniac, a playful, cute and fun fonts that perfect for any children-themed brand. It comes in a chunky font style that creates a fun and chubby looking font. Combine it with colorful fonts and you will come up with branding fonts that is perfect for any children product.
The font is easily adaptable to any design purpose. Therefore, you can use it as a logo, display it on social media, or in a product packaging. It is flexible and highly legible, so your audience will easily remember your brand anytime!
Now you have all the basic guidelines you need to create your brand and choosing the perfect branding fonts for it. You may need some time to explore the design aspects until you finally found what best represent your brand personality. However, you don’t need to worry. Spend some time to figure out the perfect brand image so that you can easily catch your audience’s attention.
Now, are you ready to build your brand personality? Go to Pollux of Geminorum to find a lot more fonts that you can explore for your branding fonts!