Ten percent of the average business’ digital marketing budget is spent on design, according to a recent study by Gartner. Many elements go into design, but one you want to pay particular attention to is typography. Thousands of fonts are available and each has its own voice that represents your business. Avenue 25 reports that bad fonts make it more difficult for customers to respond to calls to action and instructions, with a full 83 percent being intimidated or frustrated by a hard-to-read script font. Instead of losing out on business or ending up on the Internet as a viral meme because your font makes your business signs look like they’re saying something vulgar, learn how to pick out great fonts for your business.
Matching Your Business
Many businesses go with a crisp, clear, and professional font for all of their marketing needs. The advantages to this type of font is that it’s easy to read, easy to print, and it leaves a professional impression on your customers. However, if you run a business targeted at kids, or another fun-centric business, you give off the completely wrong impression with a professional font. Look through the potential fonts your designers have available for you, or check out a font store such as DaFont. Match up your business’ goals and core audience with the font styles that you have available. Avoid commonly used fonts and fonts that don’t have great reputations, such as Comic Sans.
Elements of Color and Style
Picking a font is only the first step on your typography journey. The use of sizing, kerning, and color also plays into the effectiveness of your font. Smashing Magazine takes a look at several fonts, showing how you can use standard serif fonts in a fresh way with color, keeping things playful by changing the direction of the font an design elements, and ways to put a bold font to use. You also want the font to be consistent across your print and online media, so pick up a font that works well for business cards printing, brochure printing, and other types of marketing material.
Bringing It All Together
Once you have your core font and style, you need to bring it together with the rest of your website and marketing material design elements. You don’t want to introduce too many fonts into your logo or marketing materials, as it begins to look over the top fairly quickly and clashes. If you do want to use multiple fonts, make sure that they are working together instead of against each other. You can use the main font for a typeface for your logo, with the business tagline underneath in a different, more readable font.
Test the font selection on your office and core demographic. If you’re catering to an older demographic, you want to focus on easy-to-read fonts that are larger than average in order to accommodate eyesight issues in an aging population. For younger demographics, focus on color and unique design elements to make everything pop.
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