All fonts are not created equal. That’s hardly surprising, considering that there’s anywhere between 130,000 to 550,000 fonts out there, or even more, depending on who you ask!
You may not give a lot of thought to all those options until suddenly it’s time to decide on a font for your business logo design.
How can you sort through all those different choices without getting overwhelmed?
To help you keep a clear head and successfully find the perfect font, it’s important to base your choice on solid factors, rather than just your own personal liking. Here are the factors to consider:
- Your audience
- Your business type
- The competition
- Legibility
- Psychology of the font
- Sizing
Let’s go through these points and get a little more information on each one.
Know Your Audience
For a variety of reasons, it’s important to know the target demographics for your business. You need to know who you’re appealing to, what they’re likely to think of your aesthetic choices, and what connotations the font might have.
Since you’ve gotten to the point of designing your brand logo, you likely have some research on hand already. Keep those demographics in mind as you narrow down your choices.
Know Your Business
Your logo should be designed to reflect and illustrate your brand personality. That includes each element of the logo, including the font choice.
Different fonts just “read” differently on the face of them. (See the section on the psychology of fonts for more on that subject.) If your company is a modern, no-nonsense go-getter, you probably won’t want to use Comic Sans on your logo.
But if you run a daycare, Comic Sans could be right up your alley and perfectly reflect the sensibilities and personality of your business!
The important thing here is to analyze the font against the brand personality, and make sure that they align so that the message of your business logo doesn’t get muddled.
Research The Competition
Another important aspect of creating a logo is ensuring that it stands out from the competition. You want a unique logo that doesn’t blend in with the crowd. The only way to make sure that you’ve achieved that goal is to take a look at other competitors in your market, and compare your options with what is already out there.
The last thing you want, as a business owner or logo designer, is a logo that is indistinguishable from another — or even one that just looks a little too much like a copy-cat. Staying on-trend is one thing, but riding another logo’s coattails is something totally different.
Ensure Legibility
A good logo will not only be unique and memorable, it will also be user-friendly. That means that the legibility of your font will play a big part in how successful your logo actually is.
It can be tempting to get all artsy with our logos, choosing a font that catches the spirit of the brand without checking to be sure that it’s easy to understand at the same time. The difference between a logo that uses Garamond and a logo that exclusively uses Wingdings is that people know what the company that uses Garamond is called — on the other hand, the logo with Wingdings might as well be called “Pointing Hand, Mailbox, Left Arrow, Flower, Ampersand” for all they know.
You may also consider developing your own bespoke font for your business logo design — which is great, but doesn’t absolve you as a designer from ensuring the legibility of the specially-crafted font. And yes, this is coming from someone who grew up thinking that Disney was somehow spelled with a backward G. Or a backward 6, is it a 6?
Consider Font Psychology
Just as is the case with color psychology, fonts also carry an inherent message or meaning which can determine how the average viewer will react to it. There’s been a lot of research into this, much of which is subjective, but which still allows us to get a general idea of what type of font works for what occasion.
Basically, you can break down the four main types of fonts like this:
- Serif fonts invoke traditional, trustworthy values, including aspects like respectability and formality. They’re typically used for institutions like financial companies and law firms.
- Sans serif fonts are sleek and modern, a little more casual than serifs. They’re often found in use for tech companies and start-ups.
- Script fonts are loopy, complicated, and elegant. They’re often found in use for food-related or fashion-related brands.
- Handwritten fonts are unique, casual, and fun. They’re often used for small businesses and handmade goods.
Before you make your final decision on your business logo font, it’s definitely a good idea to read up on the message that your chosen font could be sending, and make sure that it aligns with your brand.
Sizing
Sizing is a final consideration that plays into the legibility and user-friendliness of your business logo, as well as enhancing the memorability. It’s easier to remember a logo if you could clearly read what it said, after all.
Sizing is an important factor because some fonts just aren’t as appealing when they’re blown up, or vice versa. This also includes font hierarchy, as you may be using more than one font, and the size in which you employ them will factor into the overall aesthetic value of your logo.
Tools And Resources
Along with those thousands and thousands of font choices, there are plenty of resources that are available to help you with your browsing. Here are a few of them.
A final word of advice is: don’t rush into anything. The perfect font for your business logo is out there, just waiting for you to find it. Take your time, get feedback, and keep up the hunt!
Author Profile
Meet Dan Jenkins, a freelance blogger with a penchant for video streaming and all things electronics. He likes to dig deep into topics he writes about whether it is graphic design or gadget reviews. He likes collecting CDs and music records.
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