Rafael Mendonçaça, the founder of Magistrate 247, keeps a running document of every typeface he has considered and rejected for a client project. It currently has 340 entries. That number is not a boast. It is an indication of how many wrong answers there are for any given brief, and how much work goes into finding the right one.
Why type matters more than most clients expect ¶
Typography is the part of a brand identity that does the most work in the most contexts. The logo appears in specific places. The typeface appears everywhere: on the website, in documents, on packaging, in email signatures, in presentations. A typeface that is slightly wrong in character will be slightly wrong in every one of those contexts, every day, for as long as the brand exists. That is a long time to live with a small mistake.
What makes a typeface right for a brand ¶
There is no formula. But there are useful questions. Does the typeface carry associations that align with the brand's positioning? A humanist sans-serif reads differently from a geometric one, even at the same weight. Does it work at small sizes on screen and at large sizes in print? Does it have the character set you need for Portuguese, including the full range of accented characters? Does it come with a licence that covers your intended uses?
The licensing question that trips up small businesses ¶
Typeface licensing is more complicated than most people realise. A font that is free for personal use may require a commercial licence for business use. A licence that covers desktop use may not cover web embedding. A licence that covers one user may not cover a team of five. We check licences on every typeface we recommend, because the alternative is a stressful afternoon discovering the problem after the files have been delivered.
Custom type versus commercial fonts ¶
Custom typefaces are expensive and take time. For most small and mid-sized businesses, a well-chosen commercial typeface, possibly with minor modifications, is the right answer. The modifications we make most often are to specific letterforms that are not quite right for the brand, or to the spacing of a wordmark. We do not modify typefaces without checking the licence first.
If you want to understand more about how we approach visual identity decisions, the work we have done section of our site shows the reasoning behind several of our projects. Type choices are always part of that reasoning.