Fonts may be used in a number of different ways across your marketing materials, and you may be wondering how many you need and how to choose them.
Examples of different usage
- Your logo may include a font, e.g. if your organisation name is written out, or in a strapline. If we are designing or updating your logo, you may have flexibility here; but you may be using a logo fixed long ago.
- Separately, a font may be used as part of an icon or illustration as part of your logo, e.g. if your company initials are used. This may be a different font to the name of your organisation next to it.
- The fonts used for text on your website (often two, one for headings and one for copy, but sometimes more).
- Fonts used in your printed materials e.g. brochures.
- Fonts used in MS Word and other Office documents
Do they all need to match?
No. You do present an image of consistency if you use the same few fonts across all of your materials, but there are other factors to consider too:
- Some fonts that are cheap and easy to use on your website may be expensive or difficult to acquire for print or desktop use.
- If sending a MS Word document to someone, the font may be substituted if the recipient doesn’t have your choice installed.
- Certain fonts may work well as part of logos but not in normal text.
- You may have to observe traditions in some contexts, or continue to use stocks of printed materials, while having a free hand on your new website.
It’s usually perfectly fine if the fonts you use in print or Office templates don’t match the ones on your website. If you use a particularly memorable font, or your brand is to do with typography (e.g. a newspaper), then consistency might be more important.
Where can we choose fonts for our website?
For the first several years of website design, the norm was to choose from fonts that you could be sure your visitors would have installed on their computers – which meant a pretty small selection of web-safe fonts. Now, however, font libraries such as Adobe Typekit or Google Fonts make embedding attractive fonts on websites very easy, and vastly increase your options.
It’s common to consider font pairings, where one font (perhaps a serif font) is used for headings an another (a sans-serif) for copy text. Here are some places you can browse through font pairings:
Adobe Typekit
- https://justmytype.co/typekit/
- http://typ.io/libraries/typekit
- or try making your own: http://typekit.fontdata.com/
Google Fonts
- http://fontpair.co/
- https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/best-google-font-combinations-typeface-pairings/
We’ve chosen some. Now what?
Just tell us which ones, and we’ll do the rest, including identifying the costs should you want to use the fonts offline in future.