Choosing a Font

As a Chicago design firm, we cannot stress the importance of choosing the right font enough.  When we are working with a client on creating logos and design pieces, one of the first things we take into account is the font choice. The font chosen for your advertisement or design piece has a huge impact on the way people will view your brand. As a marketing company we rely on techniques to make viewers more interested in your products and services through advertisements and creative pieces.  Believe it or not, but there are tens of thousands of existing fonts with new ones being created on a daily basis.  With so many choices out there, what prompts graphic design companies to choose one font over all the others and why are so many generic fonts overused?  It's a tough call.

Font choice is crucial when creating an advertisement or design piece.  Typography is a great way to set a mood or compliment branding in an advertisement or design piece.  It may not be the first thing you notice, but the font you choose for your pieces can either make or break your design. The content of the material presented in your design and the purpose of the design are main factors when deciding on a specific font.  A corporate look usually falls with more traditional, clean and straight fonts while something less formal can benefit from utilizing stylized fonts.

When choosing a font, there are many aspects of design that we, as graphic designers, think about.  With so many fonts in existence its crazy how overused certain fonts are.  It is very easy to fall into the trap of using default fonts.  The fonts that are standard with software setup are not always the best choice depending on what you’re trying to achieve with your advertisement or design piece.  It is very typical to see people using common, simple fonts such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman.  When working on an advertisement or design piece, use a good portion of your time to look at font to find the perfect fit.  Our Chicago design firm uses multiple font books and agents, but there are also  many different online resources with free downloadable unique fonts. If you are interested in searching for creative, unique fonts check out these sites:

Dafont.com

Fontspace.com

Addictivefonts.com

Now you’ve searched for the perfect font and have finally chosen one.  Awesome!  What’s next?  Consider the size of your font and color choice.  Size and color alone can make or break your choice.  Some fonts look totally different at a small size then they do at a large size, so make sure you check out how your font looks at various sizes. 

Font can truly become a huge focal point of any advertisement or design piece, especially when it is done creatively.  Creating headers of different colors and sizes can draw a large amount of attention to the font on your piece and help intrigue viewers to read your content and learn more.  Make sure with an ad or creative piece that you design that you balance out your images and text.  A successful ad or design will have text and images that compliment each other, not overpower one another.  

Want to know more about choosing font?  Leave us a comment below or contact us.  

Graphic Design Firm: 8 Ways to Name a Company

Chicago Graphic Design

There are several ways to name a company, and some of the best known companies in the world have the strangest names. Did you know where they came from though? They'd don't just pop out of nowhere (well...not all of them), and there's usually a premeditated strategy behind their origins.

That's the case with many famous branding solutions behind Google, Pepsi, Ford, Digg and many others. Their names stick not only because they're simple, but they're different. There is no ideal way to choose a company name, but choose from the following 8 styles to shape your new company's name.

Family Names
This is the most common style of naming a company, and many car and manufacturing companies follow this convention. The person is usually the owner, founder, a child or perhaps even a celebrity! For example: Getty Images, Ford, Mercedes Benz, Boeing and Dell are all named after the owner or a family member.

Made Up
A creative way of naming a company is coming up with something that nobody has ever heard before or using a nick name. One reason for this might be to make the company sound foreign or to make it sound memorable. For example: Haagen-Dazs is a made up name with no meaning, and Meebo has absolutely no documentation behind it.

Metaphors

The most trendy and often used way of branding a company is using a metaphor or analogy. It's a term that is used to imply or to bear resemblance to something else. It may have no relation to your actual business, but that could be a selling point. Example: Apple, Adobe, and Fuji. Steve Jobs isn't selling apples, you can be sure of that!

Abbreviations or Acronyms
Most convenient, but perhaps not the smartest is using an abbreviation. It should be used only in cases of longer company names. When doing this, you should brand yourself based on how you want it pronounced, individually or as a single word, example: DKNY or BeBo. Example: FCUK - French Connection United Kingdom, and BMW - Bayerische Motoren Werke. Didn't know that one didja?

Conjunctions
When you're running out of ideas, just mash two together. Microsoft? Microcomputer and Software. Skype? Sky and Peer to Peer. This naming convention is helpful when your business does more than one thing.

Mythical Origins or Derived
Many company names are formed from reading books, mythology or from a product they sell. Popular names have come from Greek, Latin and Gods and Goddesses such as Nike, Xerox and Volvo. Coca-Cola's name comes from the leaves and nuts used for flavoring.

Word Jumbles
When words aren't enough, combine numbers and letters instead. It adds a little bit more to the company name and can express a hint of techy vibes if needed. Examples are 3Com - a network technology producer, and 20th Century Fox, a film and movie studio.

Be Playful!
Sometimes company names are a mistake, or the owner having a little fun with word play. Sometimes the name comes out of the original idea being taken! Call it a twist of fate, but I call it pure genius. Some of these funny examples are (go figure) - Google, a mispelling of the word Googol, Digg.com - dig.com was already taken, Harpo Productions, Oprah's name spelled backwards.

So the next time you're coming up with a new company name, look through the dictionary, or read a good book. Perhaps you can even take a few of your favorite words and screw around with the spelling. You never know what's going to stick and take off!