5 Ways to Improve Your Typography in Your Marketing

Typog­ra­phy is like cook­ing a beau­ti­ful and deli­cious cake. If your cake turns out ugly, peo­ple may not want to eat it. But if it turns out with mouth-water­ing pre­sen­ta­tion, you are bound to have more taste-testers! The same applies for typography.

mprove Your Typography in Your Marketing

The art of type dates back decades ago, where hand-made and machine devel­oped a type-tiff. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a fight but there has been con­sis­tent debates about the effec­tive­ness of typog­ra­phy from dig­i­tal to hand-made.

5 Ways to improve your typography in your marketing

Arrang­ing type is an art form. It orig­i­nat­ed from hand-made man­u­scripts and includes hand-set type, before com­put­ers rev­o­lu­tion­ized the process. When Johannes Guten­berg invent­ed mov­able type, mass pro­duc­tion and reduced print­ing costs became available.

Now that every­thing is dig­i­tal, have you noticed that let­ter­ing and hand-made type are mak­ing a come­back? Humans by nature, are visu­al crea­tures and have a need to feel con­nec­tions to what they pur­chase. With lit­er­al­ly thou­sands of font options avail­able on apps, pro­grams, etc., it can be hard to know which ones are the most effective.

Do you can have a great vision and a sol­id mar­ket­ing plan for your busi­ness, but when it comes to typog­ra­phy or even com­bin­ing fonts you feel con­fused and frus­trat­ed? Well, we are here to help! This arti­cle will guide you on 5 ways you can improve your typog­ra­phy in marketing.

1. Fontmares happen.

It is impor­tant to con­sid­er how your fonts inter­act with one anoth­er when you com­bine them. If you don’t have the pro­grams that allow you to edit the height between each line (lead­ing) you can end up with font­mares like the one below to the right. Zapfi­no is a font that has real­ly long ascen­ders and descen­ders that will over­lap when used on var­i­ous lines of text.

Can you tell how easy it is to read the text on the left vs. the one on the right?

5 ways to improve your typography for marketing

2. Choose a font with a consistent x‑height.

The x‑height of a type­face is the height of the low­er­case let­ters, not includ­ing ascen­ders and descen­ders. When the x‑height is con­sis­tent it allows your eye to trav­el eas­i­ly from let­ter to let­ter. Long para­graphs of text can become daunt­ing when the x‑height is incon­sis­tent. More impor­tant­ly, incon­sis­tent x‑heights affect visu­al impact and read­ing efficiency.

While cer­tain type choic­es may make sense for your mar­ket, let’s say children’s edu­ca­tion, it is wise to lim­it the use of it on long para­graphs. Our exam­ple below uses the same copy on the left and right. The let­ters weren’t that clear and enlarg­ing them for vis­i­bil­i­ty means you lose copy space — some­thing that is very impor­tant to adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing. Did you also notice how much longer it took you to read the text on the right?

5 ways to improve your typography for marketing

3. Avoid punctuation mark abuse.

In mar­ket­ing, it is easy to only focus on the con­tent and for­get about how it’s rep­re­sent­ed in visu­al form.

One of the worse typog­ra­phy errors we con­sis­tent­ly see, is the mis­use of quo­ta­tion marks. For exam­ple, quo­ta­tion marks can’t be used when refer­ring to someone’s height (see below). Instead, you should use prime marks (or dumb quotes). Know­ing when to use quo­ta­tion marks vs. prime marks, will set your mar­ket­ing con­tent apart. Details real­ly do matter!

5 ways to improve your typography for marketing

4. Logos, logos, logos.

We under­stand that small busi­ness­es can have bud­get lim­i­ta­tions, espe­cial­ly in their found­ing year. Decid­ing to devel­op your own logo or to work with almost free design­ers can be detri­men­tal to your brand. Should you try either of these, we want to equip you with the knowl­edge that will help you devel­op stronger results.

Leg­i­bil­i­ty is incred­i­bly impor­tant for logos. Remem­ber to keep in mind how small you are plan­ning to place your logo. The small­er you need it, the more sim­pli­fied it may need to become.

Using the wrong font, will cre­ate cost­ly issues. Take a look at our exam­ple on the bot­tom right. If you were to see that on a sign, would you be able to read it as you walked by a busy mall or event? Isn’t the exam­ple to the left A LOT eas­i­er to read? An unim­pres­sive logo can result in lost leads, sales or even loy­al customers.

5 ways to improve your typography for marketing

5. Use some scale for contrast.

Using dif­fer­ent type sizes allows you to cre­ate dynam­ic con­tent, con­trast and hier­ar­chy. You don’t always need to use 20 dif­fer­ent fonts in your mar­ket­ing con­tent. Actu­al­ly, you should NEVER use 20. We rec­om­mend fol­low­ing a rule of thumb and using no more than three. Oth­er­wise the soup of fonts will also con­fuse your readers.

You can cer­tain­ly cre­ate beau­ti­ful con­trast by scal­ing type, and using one or two fonts, like our exam­ple below (on the right). On the exam­ple to the left, the type feels bor­ing, bulky and doesn’t empha­size the inten­tion of the text. As mar­keters, you spend a lot of time devel­op­ing con­tent that res­onates with your tar­get mar­ket. Make sure you max­i­mize your efforts and use the type scale trick to cre­ate empha­sis for spe­cif­ic words.

5 ways to improve your typography for marketing

Our tips are meant to help you make bet­ter choic­es for any future projects you may have — from a sim­ple office memo to your brands’ visu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion across the board.

I’d love to hear from you, what is your biggest frus­tra­tion when it comes to typography?

About the Author

Nicte Cuevas, Principal of Nicte Creative Design, empowers mission-driven businesses through strategic design & branding. Nicte has applied this when working with Adobe Spark and Twitter Business, LinkedIn Learning, Dogs on Deployment and Purina, Girl Scouts, The Houston Zoo and The Contemporary Arts Museum. Her excellence in communication design & marketing has been recognized by multiple national / international awards, including a coveted feature in Graphic Design USA's People to Watch.

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  1. What fan­tas­tic posts! All of these guide­lines and ways are very authen­tic and help­ful for all design­ers. I will try to use it in my upcom­ing projects.
    Thanks for sharing.

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