Are Custom Typefaces Worth the Hype?

Brand identity is paramount for business success, but do businesses need to have a custom typeface?

Creating your own typeface gives you control over your brand’s overall look and feel, helping you to create a distinct visual identity across written communications and formats. This helps you to create a brand (note that your brand is different to your business), and is a valuable asset in allowing you to be consistent and build brand recognition with customers.

Brands With Custom Fonts

Here are 9 brands in various sectors that have created a custom typeface to develop their business, that I think have done it right.

Virgin Money

Virgin Money’s branding pulls on similar features from the Virgin branding, but without the corporate look of other financial service companies. The Virgin Money font family uses a balance of curves and hard angles to reflect modern and forward-thinking values.

The brand uses both Virgin Money Sans and Virgin Money Loop, with the Sans font having five weights, and has been designed to have optimum legibility through all sizes and applications, with geometric curves, hard angles, and humanist forms.

The Loop font is a modified version of Sans, but incorporates the distinctive brand loop element to create a sense of movement.

Netflix

One of the world’s most popular brands, Netflix uses its own font — Netflix Sans. The font was made to pop on display, and to emit the cinematic feel of the brand.

Airbnb

Airbnb recently launched their new logo along with a custom font — Air. The strong, sans serif font was required to translate well across all sites and content due to the fact that the brand operates worldwide. Airbnb focuses on good user-experience, which is another requirement the font supports.

TUI

Like all brands, a custom font needs to reflect the personality of the brand itself. TUI’s custom font feels friendly and inviting. The font works well in both text and display sizes — as TUI uses traditional, printed media as well as digital media. The font family uses the curves and strokes seen in the logo, making it feel full of character. It needed to have character but still readability in smaller sizes.

Duolingo

Duolingo is a language company, so it makes sense for them to have a custom typeface font. Their font expresses their fun personality, using custom font Feather Bold for main headings.

National History Museum

Focusing on accessibility and inclusivity, the National History Museum uses custom font NHM Wallop. With rounded forms, the font makes it easy for users to read from both up close and far away.

Happy Face Pizza

Unlike other corporate brands mentioned in this post, Happy Face Pizza takes a fun twist on a custom font. Using the Happy Face logo (meant to reflect the feelings of enjoyment after a good meal), the Happy Face Display font references 1970’s Italian design along with rounded forms.

Hyphen

Instead of creating a full custom font, Hyphen tweaked Gza font to include the grammatical ‘H’ seen in the brand’s logo, to develop a bespoke alphabet.

Lorod

Lorod’s branding plays on the timeless style of their pieces, reflecting the craftsmanship. Similar to Lorod, the brand’s typeface is taken from Austin Bold and personalised to give a 1970’s feel. As you can see, ‘O’ letters are tipped slightly — referencing the constructions of garments and unexpected details of the clothing.

My company Ballyhoo can help to build your brand identity. Whether you have an existing brand identity that you want updating, or need to start from scratch, we will collaborate with you to create a visual concept that tells your unique business story.