How We Choose Fonts

Inside the Mind of a Tdotter

Have you ever heard of font psychology? It’s a powerful thing; a design factor that can dramatically change how your brand is viewed by your audience. As we all know, people have different thoughts, feelings and associations with things – font types are one of them! To bring some well-known fonts into the mix, for example, using Comic Sans will make your audience feel differently than using a font like Montserrat or Arial. Even something as simple as using all uppercase letters has an impact on how your design or your business is viewed!

In this blog post, join us as we take a deep dive inside the mind of a Tdotter and how we choose fonts for our client designs.

Let’s Get Technical

Starting off on a technical note, the target audience we’re trying to reach is a major factor in all design decisions. If the audience is older, we typically opt for a cleaner, more legible, sans serif font that isn’t too thin or too bold. If the goal of the design is to attract a younger demographic, we might go for a stylized font instead – something like serif or sans serif, while experimenting with different font weights. When we need to make a statement in accent content (which refers to text that isn’t too long, like a pre-header) that’s when we’ll experiment with uppercase and lowercase.

“During the concept design phase, we have a step specifically for font exploration. This allows us to analyze the psychology behind the brand and how we can best represent it through the right combination of fonts, styles, and typesetting.”

– Joti Bhuller, Tdot Design Director

When designing for a traditional or corporate brand, we tend to use sans serif fonts combined with deep rich tones of blue, green, black or red to create a modern, more mature feel. If we’re going for modern and high-end, we opt for sans serif fonts and a neutral palette with an accent colour to add some visual interest like orange, yellow, green or blue. The weight of the font also has an impact on the final look and feel of the design – for something more modern, we’ll use a thinner weight and for a business that wants to be portrayed with strength and stability, a thicker weight.

Colour Psychology

It’s no secret that different colours make you feel different things. Take a moment to think about your favourite restaurant and its logo. Restaurants that promote health and well-being tend to use colours like green, blue and yellow in their logos and overall branding. In colour psychology green signifies health, blue as strength, and yellow as warmth and optimism. Makes sense, right?

When choosing colours to represent a specific brand, we think about what we want to make the audience feel. Red and orange signify friendliness, excitement, boldness, and inspiring playful youth. Most healthcare companies will use colours like purple, light grey and blue, which all have been proven to make people feel as though the company is more calm, balanced, clean and trustworthy – exactly what you’d look for in a healthcare brand.

Being a designer isn’t as simple as combining different colours and fonts together to make graphics look pretty – there’s a whole other psychological part of it that has to be thought through in order to create the best possible work for properly representing each and every brand while being aesthetically pleasing to their target audiences. Check out our portfolio of work here, and make sure to follow us on social @truedotdesign to see even more of what our design team can do!