One of the key elements of a brand are the fonts used in your print and marketing materials. Which makes sense because they are the thing that presents one of the most important things in your materials, the copy. I would be willing to bet you’ve probably spent a lot of time searching for and selecting the font that you feel best represents your brand and your message.
You and your fellow marketers have selected what you think is the perfect font, but when you tell the designers and developers working on your website that you want to use it and they say no! What, why?!
Well, chances are that the brand font you’ve selected won’t translate into a website design. Many times clients send us font files thinking we can use on the web and that using them won’t cost anything, but usually we have to pay for the web version/licensing because we need certain file types ( ttf, off, woff, woff 2.0, svg, eot) in order for the fonts to display properly across browsers and platforms. While there are free web fonts out there, the selection is rather limited, so you have to pay to get access to a lot of fonts.
So what happens if you decide to ignore the advice of your designers and developers and use a font that isn’t one that you’ve paid for the rights to use? Well, we’ve heard some horror stories of people being fined because they were caught using fonts that they hadn’t purchased the rights to use. So save yourself time, and in the long run, money and make sure that the font you are using is one that you actually have the rights to use.
How do you know how much the font you would like to have on your site will cost to use? Many places (like myfonts.com) sell usage rights based on the number of page views that you receive per month.
Photo Credit – myfonts.com
So it’s crucial that you are measuring the number of visitors to your site so you know what type of license to buy for your fonts. Although this is something that you should be tracking anyways if you hope to have any type of successful online presence.
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