A successful brand is all in the details. It’s easy to get caught up in designing that perfect logo or snappy tagline for your business, while ignoring the finer points of your brand strategy. Fonts are often overlooked. Many people take them for granted while dashing off e-mails or memos, but underestimate the importance of typography and risk devaluing all the hard work you’ve poured into your brand.
It’s important to get things right the first time. Choose a font style and color that best represents your business and then stick with it. Consistency is key. Keep these points in mind when developing a font you’ll be happy with for years to come.
Find the Fonts that Work
Search for font styles that best fit within your company’s branding strategy. Think of your business as a person; what kind of personality do you want to convey? Is your company an aggressive sales corporation or a high-end clothing store? Serif fonts typically offer more elegant characters while sans serif fonts are more clean and modern. Also consider whether any style variations would be appropriate, such as italics, light, regular or bold. Your font should always function as an extension of your brand.
Plan Ahead
Make sure your fonts reflect not only what the company is today, but also what it might evolve into 10 or 20 years in the future. Could your business change in any way that would make, for example, an extravagant serif font seem out of place? If you don’t consider this, your business could face a dilemma: abandon the current font and all the brand recognition it has already built up or stick with a design that no longer works for your business.
Determine Your Font’s Function
Where will people be reading your font? Business cards? Billboards? Online? It’s often better to use a sans serif font for websites whereas serif fonts often work well for longer documents. Try using fonts with contrasting characteristics for headlines and body text, which will build visual texture to your document or web page. You can also use all similar fonts for a more streamlined look.
Keep Things Consistent
Companies that are inconsistent in how they use fonts will come across as unprofessional. Carefully chosen fonts can help deliver a strategic message, whereas random diversity mutes your brand’s voice and can portray a lack of structure. This is especially true for websites. Never use one font for the Home page and another font for the Contact Us page, for example. This can confuse readers as they navigate the site and can make information difficult to read. Even print brochures or newsletters can be confusing if fonts are not kept consistent.
Develop a Global Style Sheet
Ensure that everyone who will be updating the website, printing new business cards or tweaking your brochure always consults your company’s style guide. This document is the font bible for your business, outlining which colors and styles can be used for certain materials. It may also contain information on the use of images and positioning of text. Developing a comprehensive style sheet can take some time, but it will pay off by ensuring your brand’s voice doesn’t become muddled by inconsistencies.




A brand is one of the most amazing phenomenons in business. A great brand is a living, breathing specimen that must be cared for. Even in businesses that aren’t “brand-heavy,” such as non-chain restaurants; graphic design can play an important role in brand perception. A great graphic designer will be fully aligned with your businesses future, as well as your target demographics’ needs.
Only a few years ago small business owners with a website were ahead of the pack. If they had a CMS that ran the website they were seriously ‘out there’. Trust me, I’ve been building CMS-based sites for 5 years and in the early days we didn’t even tell people they were able to update their own sites because they didn’t want to know about it.
Steve Jobs knows about design. He said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”. Every great small business website has a purpose or a goal. This goal goes far beyond the elements of design but it starts with the design.
There’s a point when your company needs a website and the way you approach this project defines the outcome. There are certain things you do and certain things you need to know before you even start talking to website design companies. Here’s a short list of the steps to take in order to get great websites:
Small businesses have enough on their plate at the moment simply making ends meet. As a result of the economic downturn and reduced consumer confidence there is just less and less money to go around.


