Choosing the Right Type Pairing for Your Brand

Type pairing advice usually ends at contrast: pair a serif with a sans, a display face with a workhorse. True enough, but contrast alone produces pairings that are merely inoffensive. We aim for pairings that carry the brand voice.

Start from the reading distance

The body face is chosen first, at real sizes, in real paragraphs. Only when the reading experience holds do we audition display faces against it, and we audition them in headlines the client will actually write.

If the headline face cannot survive a quarterly earnings announcement, it cannot be the brand face.

From our type pairing checklist

Finally we stress the pairing across weights and languages. A pairing that only works in bold English is not a system, it is a poster.