The article was originally published on Medium by Himanshu Khanna.
Last week, I was having a skype call with a friend in Italy, who also happens to be a designer. And like every other time, we took a detour to one of our favorite topics of discussion — ‘clients’.
Call it coincidence, fate or a mutual observation, we both have been asked the same question time and again, by our clients. They may pop up as suggestions or doubts. At times, they are more of a threat!
The common ones are “all my office computers have Arial. Let’s use it for our logo”
“I thought logos are always Times New Roman”
“My daughter loves Comic Sans!”
To sum up all the versions of this typical query and deliver it into a simple sentence, it would be, “why can’t we use a regular font for our logo?”
Typically, a brand identity or logo project gets stuck at a ‘font’ intervention, where some members of the client’s team are unsure of how a unique font/typeface approach is better than a ‘regular font’ approach. Their apprehension is valid and reasonable.
This is where I decided to do a simple exercise to recreate famous brands using regular fonts, to “RegulaBrands”. The intent is evaluate whether regular fonts are acceptable or do we need customised, unique versions of fonts for better brand identities and logos.
Please be honest and have a look at these 8 recreated brands. It will be exciting to share your thoughts and have a discussion on this exercise.
The notion of a brand identity or in common lingo, a logo, is to:
1. Create a unique personality that defines what attributes your brand stands for
2. Define a unique visual imagery that’s easily recognizable by one’s subconscious
Of course, there is a lot more that goes into creating highly functional and memorable brand identities, the two above form a great framework to review an identity and improve the possibilities of how the identity (logo) is perceived by its consumers.
A technical implication we designers tend to miss at times, is of type (font) licenses. It’s essential to secure a license for the brand that’s using the font (some are available for free) and make sure it’s mentioned in the brand guidelines. A couple of great resources for finding unique (paid & free) fonts are Font Squirrel, DaFont, Font Fabric and Fonts.com.
That said, I wish I could find a brand which would use ‘Comic Sans’ as its RegulaBrand but no luck till now. Maybe, you could suggest a brand?
What’s the verdict? Are the RegulaBrands working better than the original brands?
Really excited to read your comments and discuss why do type designers not choose a regular font too often and more.
The article was originally published on Medium by Himanshu Khanna.
