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Type is the part of an identity people notice least and see most. A logo appears a few times on a package; the type carries every ingredient, price, and opening hour. That is why I choose it before I draw anything else, and why I start at the bottom.
Start at the smallest size
The first test is never a headline. It is the line of small print on the back of a label, the footnote on an invoice, the caption under a product photo on a phone. If a typeface falls apart at 7 points on uncoated paper, it does not matter how good it looks at 120.
So I set a real paragraph of the client’s own text, small, and print it. Open counters, a generous x-height, and clear differences between similar characters (the l, the 1, the I) matter more at that size than any detail you can only admire in a headline.
Two families are enough
Almost every small brand I work with needs one family for reading and, at most, one for voice. A third is nearly always a sign that the first two were not chosen well. Before adding a family, try weight, size, case, and spacing. A single grotesque in three weights can carry a whole identity.
When a client asks for a second family, I ask what job it will do that the first one can’t. “It looks nice” is not a job. “It sets prices and figures in tidy columns” is.
If you need a third typeface to make the hierarchy work, the hierarchy is the problem.
Test it in the real material
Ink spreads on uncoated stock and fills in thin strokes. A delicate, high-contrast serif that sparkles on screen can turn muddy on kraft paper. Screens have their own traps: a light weight that looks refined on a large monitor can vanish on a phone in sunlight.
For Corvane Press, the posters for their autumn print fair were pulled by hand through a screen, 300 of them. Fine hairlines would have clogged the mesh by the fortieth pull. We set everything in one condensed grotesque, used only the regular and the bold, and kept the smallest text at a size the mesh could hold for the whole run.
Licences are part of the design
A typeface is not chosen until it is licensed for every place it will be used: desktop for the team’s documents, web for the site, an app if there is one, and sometimes broadcast or large packaging runs. I check the licence before I present a direction, not after the client has fallen for it. Swapping a face late costs more goodwill than money.
For every project I keep a simple sheet: the family, the licence type, what it covers, and who paid for it. It travels with the final files, so the next designer doesn’t have to guess.
Set a scale, then stop
I give each identity a short type scale and nothing else: usually five sizes, each with its line height and spacing. My working checklist:
- body text between 16 and 18 pixels on screen, 9 to 11 points in print
- lines of about 60 to 75 characters for reading text
- a little extra letter spacing for small capitals and all-caps labels, a little less for very large headlines
- one size jump big enough to be felt between headline and body, rather than three small ones
- real quotation marks, apostrophes, and dashes, set once in the master files so nobody has to remember them
The quiet part of the job
Good type choices rarely get compliments. People say the brand feels calm, clear, or well made, and they can’t say why. That is the right outcome. After eleven years, I still print every scale on the client’s real paper before I call it done.
Written by
Hugo Merrin
Independent brand designer and art director
Hugo designs identities, packaging, and print for small makers from a studio in Lisbon. Eleven years in, every project still starts with a pencil and a printed proof. He writes here about process, pricing, and the craft behind each job.
