Brand & Identity

Typography is the most visible component of brand identity. The typeface you choose for a logo, the capitalisation convention you enforce across your product, and the consistency you maintain across mediums — these decisions compound into the visual fingerprint that users associate with your brand.

Logo typeface

The logo typeface is not necessarily the typeface that looks best in general. It is the typeface whose specific letter shapes look best for the letters in your brand name. A typeface with a gorgeous lowercase g is wasted on a brand that does not contain one.

When choosing a logo typeface:

• Set your brand name in thirty or forty candidates, at the size it will appear most often. Eliminate quickly — you are looking for the face where your specific letters look distinctive.
• Pay attention to the characters you actually use. A five-letter brand name might hinge on how one typeface draws its lowercase a or its capital R.
• Favour distinctive glyphs over generic ones. If two faces look similar at your brand's letter set, pick the one with more character.

Brand capitalisation

Pick a consistent capitalisation convention and enforce it everywhere:

• Initial cap (Acme) — the simplest, most readable option for most brands.
• All caps (ACME) — works for short names with letterspacing. Avoid for names longer than two words.
• Mid-word cap (AcmeCorp) — only if the brand has always used it. It is hard to read and hard to write consistently.

Avoid .com in brand names — it dates the brand and clutters every mention. Avoid all-lowercase in running text; while it can work as a stylistic choice in logos, it decreases readability in paragraph contexts.

The most important rule: consistency. If the brand is "Acme" on the website, it should not be "ACME" in the app, "acme" in emails, and "AcMe" in documentation. Every inconsistency erodes the visual identity.

Cross-medium consistency

The typefaces you choose must work across every medium the brand touches:

• Web — WOFF2, variable fonts, Google Fonts, or self-hosted from a foundry.
• Print — OTF or TTF, installed on design machines, embedded in PDFs.
• Mobile apps — bundled into the app binary. iOS and Android handle font loading differently.
• Email — web fonts have limited email client support. Always define robust fallback stacks.
• Video and motion — the same faces, rendered at large sizes, often exposing quality issues invisible at body sizes.

A brand that uses Helvetica on the web, Georgia in emails, and system fonts in its app sends a message: we did not think about this. Users feel the inconsistency even if they cannot name it.

Licensing

Fonts have licenses. Using a font without the correct license is both illegal and — for a brand that cares about craft — contradictory.

• Desktop license — for use in design tools (Photoshop, Figma, Sketch). Covers print output.
• Webfont license — for @font-face on websites. Often priced by pageview tier.
• App license — for embedding in native mobile or desktop applications.
• Server license — for server-side rendering or PDF generation.

Google Fonts and other open-source libraries are free for all uses. Premium foundries charge per format and usage tier. Buy the full family if budget allows — you will need the weights eventually, and piecemeal purchasing costs more long-term.

Do not use pirated fonts. Beyond the legal risk, pirated files are often incomplete — missing kerning tables, OpenType features, or entire character sets that make the typeface worth using.

Making body text distinctive

Most web projects default to the same small set of typefaces — Inter, system-ui, Helvetica, Roboto. These are good defaults, but they are defaults. A brand that invests in a distinctive body typeface — not exotic, just considered — signals that every layer of the product has been thought about.

You do not need a rare or expensive face. You need one that:

1. Reads well at body sizes (good x-height, open apertures, decent kerning).
2. Ships the weights and styles you need (regular, italic, bold, bold italic at minimum).
3. Is not the same face your three closest competitors use.

Experiment beyond the defaults. Aim for recognisable body-text identity — the kind where a reader could identify your product from a screenshot of a single paragraph.

The one distinctive move

Every project should have at least one distinctive typographic choice — a decision that separates it from the template defaults. It could be:

• A specific typeface for headlines that nobody else in your space uses.
• Letterspaced small caps for section labels.
• Oldstyle figures in running text.
• A branded colour for h2 headings.

One deliberate choice, applied consistently, does more for brand identity than six half-committed ones. Protect that choice — resist the temptation to change it with every redesign. Brand equity in typography is built through repetition.