Choosing a brand typeface: why one family is often enough

A brand’s consistency can come apart in its typography very easily, and the reason is almost embarrassingly simple: changing a typeface takes two clicks. Anyone with a computer can pick a new one from a menu. Nobody touches the logo file, but presentation titles, flyers and social media posts each get made in a slightly different face.

Why typefaces matter so much

Everything a brand says, it says in a typeface. The website, the business card, the menu, the small print on the back of a pack. Sometimes the logo isn’t visible at all, but the typeface almost always is. People recognise your brand from the type they read, too.

One family, a few weights

For most brands, the steadiest approach is one typeface family used in different weights. Bold for headlines, regular for text, a medium weight for small labels. When something needs emphasis, the weight changes, not the typeface.

That’s how our own identity works. Kischla’s only typeface is Lexend, in four weights: Light, Regular, SemiBold and ExtraBold. You won’t find another face on a slide, a web page or a business card. When we want something to stand out, we switch to ExtraBold.

Two typefaces can work. But the second one needs a real job. Every face added just for “a bit of variety” pulls the identity apart a little more.

Language support: the detail people skip

If your brand works in more than one language, check that every letter you need is there. For a brand working in Turkey, that means Ç, Ğ, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü. In plenty of typefaces those letters are missing, or look like they were added as an afterthought.

Taze Sepet is a good example. Its wordmark was drawn on Expletus Sans Bold. But that typeface doesn’t have Ğ, İ or Ş, so it stays in the logo only, as a vector file, and never appears in headlines or text.

The corporate typeface is Alegreya Sans instead. The guidelines give the reasoning: its humanist, slightly calligraphic forms share the spirit of the wordmark, and it supports every Turkish character. Its Regular, Medium, Bold and ExtraBold weights carry everything from headlines to the interface.

Choosing a typeface is setting up a hierarchy

Good guidelines don’t just name the typeface. They say how to use it. Taze Sepet’s set out four levels:

• Headline: ExtraBold, 32/36 pt.
• Subheading: Bold, 18/24 pt.
• Body text: Regular, 10.5/15 pt.
• Label: ExtraBold, 8 pt, in capitals with wide letter spacing.

There’s a fallback for office documents and email too, Calibri or Arial, so documents hold together even on a computer without the corporate typeface installed.

Trying, then deciding

It can take a few tries. Miabella’s identity tried three: Bright, a modern luxury serif; Kind Avenue, a retro display face; and Goodly, a geometric rounded sans. Goodly stayed, and the Miabella wordmark is set in Goodly Medium. The tagline uses Futura BT Medium.

So there are two typefaces here as well, but each has a clear job: one carries the name, the other the tagline.

Testing your own

• Count how many typefaces your brand appears in. More than two is a warning sign.
• Type out every special character your languages need in the face you’ve chosen and look at them.
• Is it written down which weight goes on headlines, text and small labels?
• What happens on a computer that doesn’t have the typeface installed?

Typography is one of the five core parts of a corporate identity. We covered the others in What is a corporate identity?