Fonts and Colors
our color scheme says a lot about your brand. Why? Because colors have meanings. All over the world different colors have different meanings, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to the Western meanings of colors for now.
Red: Energy, war, strength, power, love, lust and passion. It’s the color of blood and fire.
Orange: enthusiasm, happiness, creativity, joy and success
Yellow: joy, happiness, intellect and energy
Green: growth, harmony, freshness and fertility, dark green in particular of course represents money.
Blue: trust, loyalty, wisdom, intelligence, truth, faith
Purple: Power, luxury, nobility, ambition, royalty
White: innocence, purity, virginity
Black: power, elegance, evil, and mystery
(for the full list check out Color Wheel Pro)
Keep these things in mind when considering color scheme for your brand. Remember however, certain colors radiate when connected, red on blue for instance, or red on green are particularly painful to the eye colors. Be careful when choosing such colors in combinations, the last thing you want is to make people dizzy.
Like color schemes, fonts are incredibly important and speak volumes about your brand. Think of most of the top Fortune 500 companies and their brands. The fonts are generally (though not exclusively) fairly simple and extremely easy to read. You may not be a Fortune 500 company, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look your best, and an inappropriate font isn’t going to win you points.
You should chose a font that is easily readable in a variety of different mediums, print and web in particular, but that if possible also represents you and is distinctive.
Note: While there are thousands of free fonts, you need to ensure that the fonts you are using are commercial free, or open source license fonts. This means that you can use them for commercial and non-commercial projects alike without paying a fee. Most fonts that you download from the web include a Read Me/Licensing Page that spell out specifically whether or not a font is free for commercial use. Check out FontSquirrel.com for Commercial Free fonts specifically.
Finally, because this is discussing brands and because I am a bit of a font snob I will recommend that you not use Comic Sans for any reason ever, nor Papyrus. Be wary of script fonts as they are often hard to read, the main font you chose for your brand should be able to be used in a variety of different places, from your blog, to your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ covers and on any and all collateral (which I will cover later in the week).
Tomorrow I’ll be discussing the ins and outs of logo development (if you feel the need to DIY) and I’ll round the brand series off with a word on collateral which is just a fancy design term meaning anything with your logo on it. Business cards, t-shirts, cups, and everything in between.
