Brand typography: choosing typefaces and pairing them

On a web page, a deck or a social post, text covers more area than the logo, the imagery and the accent colour combined. Typography is statistically the most visible part of your identity, and the one many companies leave on whatever the editor defaulted to.

How many typefaces you need

One or two. Three only if the third has a technical job, a monospace for code, or for figures that must align in a column.

• One family, several weights. The safest option. Contrast comes from weight and size rather than mixture. Cheap to licence, hard to break.
• Two families, display and text. The display face carries personality, the text face has to be invisible. Worth the effort only if the display face genuinely says something the text face cannot.

How two typefaces actually pair

The useful rule is not “serif with sans-serif”, it is high contrast in form, close match in proportion.

1. 01Pick clearly different shapes. Two similar sans-serifs read as a mistake rather than a choice. The difference has to be obvious from across the room.
2. 02Match the x-height. This is the criterion that makes a pair look designed together. Two faces with very different x-heights look like different sizes even when they are not.
3. 03Match the width. A condensed face beside a wide one produces a page that feels unbalanced for no visible reason.
4. 04Check the figures. They have to look right together, because they will appear side by side in prices, dates and tables.

A shortcut that works: pick both faces from the same superfamily (the same design in serif and sans versions). The match is guaranteed by construction.

Check the character set before committing

The most common practical failure with typefaces, and the easiest to miss until it is too late.

• Check every accented character your markets need, in every weight you plan to use. It is common for a bold weight to be missing glyphs the regular has, at which point the browser synthesises them, visibly.
• Check comma-below versus cedilla if you set Romanian, Turkish or Latvian. Ș and Ț take a comma below; many older free fonts ship the cedilla form and it looks wrong.
• Test with a real sentence, not the alphabet. Set a line containing every accented character you need, in each weight, and look at whether anything jumps, shifts or changes weight.

The type scale

A system with no scale produces eleven slightly different heading sizes within three months. The scale is the short list of permitted sizes, each with its line height.

Two rules worth as much as the whole scale: line height falls as size rises (a large heading with body line height looks loose), and the measure stays between 65 and 75 characters, beyond that the eye loses the next line.

Licensing: what you are allowed to do

Typefaces are licensed software, not free files. The categories that matter:

For most small companies an open-source family covers everything and removes the question entirely. A commercial face is worth paying for when the display type genuinely is what differentiates the brand.

The fallback

You will need a typeface for situations where yours cannot be used: an email, a Word document sent to a partner, a form on somebody else's platform. Choose it yourself, from the system faces (Arial, Georgia, Verdana) and write it into the guidelines. Otherwise everybody chooses something different.

Common mistakes

• Synthesised bold and italic. If you use a weight the family does not have, the software fakes it. It shows, and it looks cheap. Use only weights that exist as files.
• All-caps headings without extra tracking. Capitals need increased letter spacing to breathe.
• Long text in a display face. Poster typefaces become exhausting after two paragraphs.
• Too many weights. Three is enough: body, medium, display.
• Centring long text. A ragged left edge makes the eye hunt for the start of every line.

What to fix in the guidelines

The families and where they come from, the permitted weights, the full scale with line heights, the maximum measure, the fallback, and the rules for capitals and figures. It is a short chapter of the brand guidelines, but one people actually open.

If you want pairings that are already checked (matched in proportion, with the scale and line heights calculated), RHAM generates them alongside the palette and the rest of the identity, from the same brief.