Fonts are one of those things that most people notice without necessarily thinking about them. You may not look at a website and consciously decide that the typeface feels too formal, too playful or too technical, but it can still influence how the whole business feels.
That is why choosing typography for a brand is about much more than finding a font that looks nice beside the logo.
We normally start with the character of the organisation and the feeling we are trying to create. A brand might need to feel warm and approachable, precise and technical, established and authoritative, or energetic and contemporary. Typography can help reinforce that, although we try not to fall into overly simple rules such as every traditional brand needing a serif font or every technology company needing a clean sans serif.
Sometimes the more interesting solution comes from introducing a little contrast. A modern typeface can help an established organisation feel more current, while a characterful serif can stop a technical brand feeling too clinical. What matters is whether it works with the rest of the identity. The next question is much more practical: can the font actually cope with everything the organisation needs it to do?
Something that looks fantastic as a huge heading might become awkward when it is used for a paragraph on a phone. We therefore look at how the typeface behaves at different sizes, whether the weights are genuinely useful, whether numbers are clear, whether italics exist and whether there is enough range to create a proper hierarchy.
Licensing and language support matter too. A typeface can be perfect visually and still be the wrong choice if the client cannot reasonably license it for the way they need to use it, or if it is missing characters they regularly require.
We also do not assume a brand needs several different fonts. Sometimes one strong type family gives you everything you need. Different weights, sizes and spacing can create far more variety than people expect, and keeping the typography simple can make the identity easier to manage over time.
When we do use more than one font, there normally needs to be a reason. Perhaps one brings more personality to headings while the other is easier to read in longer text. They should feel like they have been deliberately paired rather than simply being two fonts somebody happened to like.
The other important bit is that choosing the font is only the beginning. Somebody still needs to decide how big headings should be, how much space sits between lines, which weights are used and how the hierarchy works across different pages. You can use exactly the right brand font and still make a website feel inconsistent if every heading has been styled independently.
Good typography tends to quietly hold a design together. People may never comment on it directly, but they feel the difference when it has been considered properly.
