Choosing a typeface you can live with
Choosing type is the part of a brand people most want to get adventurous with, and the part where adventure costs the most later. A display face with real personality can carry a logo beautifully and then let you down everywhere else — in a long paragraph, at small sizes, in the plain email you send a supplier on a Tuesday.
Two jobs, often two faces
We usually split the work. One face for display — the name over the door, the headings, the moments that set the tone — where character matters and there are only a few words to set. Another for text — menus, labels, the website, anything long or small — where the only virtue that counts is that it is easy and quick to read. The display face can be distinctive. The text face should be nearly invisible; you should notice the words, not the letters.
Test it where it will work hardest
A typeface that looks elegant in a big heading on a bright screen is not the test. Set your actual prices in it — lots of figures, lined up. Set a phone number, an address, an allergen line. Set it small, and set it on the warm off-white or dark background you will really use, not on pure white. A lot of faces that charm you at forty pixels become hard work at fourteen, and some have figures so quirky that a price list turns into a puzzle.
A text face earns its place not in the logo but in the hundredth menu line nobody was meant to admire.
Fewer weights, chosen on purpose
A small brand does not need nine weights. It needs a regular for reading, a bold for when something must stand out, and the discipline to stop there. Every extra option is one more decision to make, consistently, forever — and inconsistency is what makes a small brand look homemade. Two weights used the same way every time will always look more considered than six used however the day went.
For most of the shops we work with, the quietly right answer is a good, familiar face for text and one characterful face reserved for the name. It is not the choice that excites a designer in the first meeting. It is the one the owner is still glad of a year later, when the novelty of anything louder would have long worn thin.
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