Choosing a brand's main typeface

A brand's main typeface is the one that sets most of its words. It is on the website and the app, the invoices and the job adverts, the back of the pack and the sign on the door. Headlines get the attention in a presentation, but the main face spends most of its life in paragraphs at 16 pixels and in legal text at 7 point. Judge it there first. Many strong brands choose a main face that readers barely notice, and let the logotype, the colour and a display face carry the personality.

Choosing one is mostly elimination. Start from what the brand has to set: how much body copy, in which languages, at what sizes, on what media, and by whom. Those constraints remove most candidates before taste arrives. A family with three weights cannot run an interface. A face with no Cyrillic cannot follow the brand into Bulgaria or Ukraine, so a second face gets bought later and the brand looks different in Sofia. A licence priced by page views becomes a yearly bill nobody budgeted for. Whatever survives these tests is the shortlist, and only then does the look of the letters decide.

Large organisations now make this choice in public, and their reasons are worth reading. In January 2018 the BBC explained why it had commissioned its own family, BBC Reith, from the London foundry Dalton Maag. It gave three reasons. Its most used fonts, Helvetica and Arial, were anonymous. Those two and Gill Sans, its old corporate face, had been designed for print and read poorly on screens. And owning its type would cut what it paid every year for licences. Two months later Netflix launched Netflix Sans, also made with Dalton Maag, to replace Gotham, and its brand design lead Noah Nathan said that for a business as global as Netflix, font licensing can get quite expensive.

Language coverage is where many type choices fail later. A font contains only the characters its makers drew, and a missing one shows up as an empty box that type people call tofu. Google named its Noto family after the aim of ending that, no more tofu. Even inside the Latin alphabet, Polish needs letters such as ł and ą, and Vietnamese stacks two accents on one letter. Plenty of fashionable display faces have neither. IBM released its own family, IBM Plex, in 2017 to replace Helvetica, gave it away under an open licence, and the family now covers Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Thai, Korean and Japanese as well as Latin. Plex is also a superfamily, with a sans, a serif and a mono drawn to shared proportions, which is a common answer when a brand needs a formal voice and a friendly one that still look related.

The professional habit is to test with the brand's own words. A specimen showing the alphabet at 120 point tells you nothing about how a face behaves as a paragraph at 16 pixels, which is where it will spend its life. Paste in a page of the company's actual writing, with its longest product name, a price table and its worst legal sentence, and set it at every size the brand uses. Then read it closely. Check that a capital I, a lower-case l and the figure 1 can be told apart, that the numbers line up in a column, and that the italic is a real italic rather than a slanted roman.

Treat the licence as one of the criteria from the start. How font licences are priced, and how the cost grows with the business, is the subject of the next lesson, "Licensing for a brand at scale". For the choice itself, one point belongs here. Several of the best working typefaces are now free under open licences, such as IBM Plex and most of Google Fonts, and choosing one takes the licence question off the table. The trade is simple. A free face is free for your competitors too, so the brand's distinctiveness has to come from somewhere else.