A logo basically contains 3 elements such as icon, font and colour palette. Each of it plays a specific role. When these three elements come together, a new kind of logo will emerge. It tells the story of your company, business, product, brand or services.
In this article, we are not discussing about all the three elements, but will see the essential job of logo font. (I will come with another article for icon and colour palette).
Many business people think that the font for their business must look like their trophy wife. They only see how it looks and they never mind about any of its features.
But the font in the logo is a little busy element. It mainly does four jobs.
1. To be understandable
2. To be scalable
3. To make your business/product name look fair
4. To support your brand definition
So, let’s look briefly into each element.
The font in the logo should be easily and quickly readable.
Enough space should be left between each word, so that it won’t bleed together when we see that visually or printed.
Make sure that you can read it at a glance. Because people won’t spend more time to read it. If it takes more time to read that clearly, then there is a chance of skipping it. So, make sure your font in a logo is legible.
This is more important when your logo is featured on a vehicle, sign or billboard where your viewers will pass across in a fast pace.
For example: Just see the above picture. The first letter is small “i” and the second letter is small “l”. In the first letter if enough space is not given between the line and the dot then it looks like a lower case letter “l”. If two “l” letters combine together, it changes the name or meaning. So, to avoid that, you need to give enough space and make it easy to read clearly.
Logo will not just appear on big things like company banner advertisements or websites. Its presence is also important on small things like postage stamps, billboard, business cards, etc. So, your fonts should be legible in different sizes. Even though the size of your logo is decreased, make sure the fonts in your logo don’t suffer.
Normally, if you use a normal or moderate font, you won’t face this kind of problem. But if you choose a heavily stylized font, then definitely the logo will suffer when the size of the logo decreases.
You have to choose the font that includes good shapes for all letters in the name. Because some letters in some fonts look robust. For example: Some lower letters such as Gs look like that. So if your business name includes that letter be aware to choose the appropriate font.
Here are some examples to choose the right font:
If your business name is long, then you are advised to choose the lighter font, so that it won’t dominate the whole logo. Make sure the font style you choose is balanced with your icon.
If you want to differentiate the most important word in the logo that shows more interest to your clients, then you can do that by changing size, color, boldness, etc. If you want to differentiate even more, then you can use combination of 2 or more fonts. The above image shows the differentiation.
You can do this through different ways in your logo. It mainly depends on how much of your brand story is told by the logo icon.
If you want to tell all the story of your brand with the icon, then all the fonts must support that. See the below image. It looks clean and fresh. It tells that the company belongs to the cutting edge business.
When it is paired with the modern and bold font, it supports the business. It indirectly tells the story that they provide strong and absolute cutting edges.
Instead of that, if you use the traditional serif font, it would make the icon look different.
In the next example, both the icon and font looks strong and well built. In the second logo it looks less stable and ready to tumble over.
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