Choosing a typeface you can live with for ten years

A logo can be redrawn every few years without anyone noticing. A typeface sits inside every email, invoice and error message a company sends, so changing it later is expensive. We treat the choice like hiring someone.

Five questions we ask

Does it have the weights and widths the product will need in three years? Does it render cleanly at eleven pixels? Does it cover every language the company sells in? Can the licence grow with the company? And does anyone on the team actually like it?

Variable fonts have made the first question easier. One file can cover a whole system, from a condensed label to a wide display line, which is how this site is set.

When to commission

If a brand’s voice depends on a letter no retail family gets right, we commission a custom cut. That happened once in the last three years, for Fjell’s condensed wordmark.