Premium fonts for graphic design
I always start my logo and brand designs with a font selection.
In fact, you may have noticed many of the most famous and most successful logos are made from a clever font choice and a manual edit to one of its characters. Sometimes this can be just on the special characters or ligature contained within the font.
Font Ligatures, Glyphs, and Swashes
Slight variations in the font can be called glyphs or ligatures, and it’s not widely known that premium fonts have hidden variations available to many font characters. The font may also have matching swashes and complementary font pairs. Like a sans serif and script pair.
Converting a font to a logo
If the font family doesn’t have glyphs or a set of ligatures, a good designer will still know the best way to use their design application to convert a font into an image from text. For there you can edit any part of that font manually using programs like Adobe Illustrator.
So now we understand that fonts are very important to logos, the next step is to find the font that is going to give your brand a kick start.
Choosing the right typeface
There are a few basic styles of fonts. The most common font styles include serifs for a premium or older look, modern san serifs, or script and hand-drawn fonts for the personal touch.
The best font for the job
At Sunshine Design I’ve been purchasing premium fonts for a number of years, and I’m always on the lookout for the next great font.
I love discovering new ways to use fonts in my projects and these days I treat fonts the same way I treat my illustrations.
Font personality
Every font has its own personality, and by working on so many logos and brands over the years you get a feel of what is going to suit each business.
Quick ways of picking a font
Since there are so many choices out there and so many combinations and interactions of letters in a business name, I used to find that selecting the best font choices was quite tedious.
Font testing process
So I’ve developed a font testing system that contains every premium font I’ve collected from years of research.
The simple 3-page document I use has all of my best font selections, all shown as ABCD Test Fonts. From there I do a simple find and replace with a brand name I’m developing.
It’s the most effective way of narrowing down font choices that I’ve found to kick-start a branding project.
Branding tools of the trade
Like any trade, you are only as good as your toolbox. So make sure your designer has a big selection of premium fonts available, or at the very least, they know where to source them from. Some good website starting points are dafont, what the font or design cuts.
Find some examples of my logo designs here.
