Type is one of the most viewed elements of your brand. Good brands stick to clean, consistent font systems that allow their marketing copy to set a mood and deliver a message. When looking at your own brand, it’s important to pay attention to your font hierarchy, and know whether or not it’s working.
What Is a Good Font Hierarchy?
An effective brand font hierarchy consists of a limited number of fonts: ideally one or two. It uses a few weights and sizes of these fonts to denote different levels of information. That’s key, because your audience wants to scan (more than read) your copy. To allow for this, you’ll want to make sure you have the following bases covered:
- A nice, eye-catching font for big display messages
- Rock-solid heading and subheading fonts
- A clean, highly readable paragraph font
When Font Hierarchies Don’t Work
In this case, there probably isn’t a hierarchy at all. There are likely too many fonts, too many weights, too many sizes and no clear significance to their use. When evaluating your fonts, it’s best to stick to a bare minimum, so each one can denote a different level of information.
Web, Print and Office Might Be a Pain
One thing a lot of branding project sponsors overlook is the technical side of fonts. Very often, a desired font is not available across all media. For example, a brand’s print font may not be available for web, or Microsoft Office. If a project sponsor doesn’t know this going into a rebrand, it can result in expensive, unforeseen font research, and costly font licenses.
Be a Font Fanatic
If you know the basics of a good font hierarchy, you’re in a good place to oversee your next rebranding project.
More About Font Hierarchies + Other Brand Design Elements
Be on the lookout for our free new ebook How to Build a Visual Identity, available soon. It’s full of best practices for executives that want the most brand for their buck. We’ll be posting more visual identity dos and don’ts leading up to the launch at the end of this month. So stay tuned. Next time, we’ll look at the art of a great visual hook.
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