What’s in a Label Font?
Your product name and information are some of the most important parts of your label design. It tells your audience what they’re buying and why your product is the best of the bunch.
But there’s more to it than the words you put on the label. It’s how you display these words that drives your customer’s first impression about your business.
Why Should You Care About the Fonts on Your Labels?
The label font you choose is just as important as the images you use on your labels. It brands your business and sends an unspoken signal to your customer about what your company stands for.
For example, if you choose a luxurious looking cursive font, your product will look more formal and high end. However, if you choose a font that looks like a child’s handwriting, your product might appeal to kids and parents of children in your target audience.
Many businesses spend just as much time sifting through the perfect font for their product labels as they do the illustrations and imagery.
What You Need to Know When Choosing Fonts
Choosing a font can seem overwhelming. As you start to dig into all of the fonts available, you will quickly notice that some are very similar, while others are worlds apart.
Decide on Your Target Market
To start your selection process, decide on the type of impression you want to give to your target audience. Is your brand playful or serious? Are you catering to the outdoors market or the luxury buyers?
Keep it Legible
Once you’ve decided on your brand’s purpose, narrow the pool to five fonts that match the image you’re trying to achieve. Be sure your fonts are always legible. Although a font might look different than any other style of typeface used on the market, if the customer isn’t able to read it, you’ll have a harder time selling your products.
Match the Design
With your narrowed selection of fonts in mind, start pairing them with your design. You might be surprised at how much some fonts clash and others complement imagery.
Where to Find the Fonts You Need
You know what you need to look for, but where do you start your hunt for the perfect label font? Turns out there are many resources available to you.
Free Fonts
Before you fork over big money for a font, try looking through the thousands of free fonts available. A few of the websites our designers recommend include:
Custom Fonts
If you’re struggling to find the perfect font from the free ones available, or if you want to ensure your font is completely unique to you, it’s worth paying a designer to come up with your design.
Custom fonts are typefaces written and designed specifically for your business. Once you have your custom font, you can upload it to any design tool or website to portray a consistent image for your brand across all mediums.
Barcode Fonts
Customizing your barcode font is a different ball game. Although you can customize the digits and characters on your barcodes, you must encode your font.
Encoding the data makes it so the scanner is able to read it (and you need the scanner to be able to read it). The barcode scanner looks for where your number starts and stops. By encoding your font, you ensure you have all of the necessary information and it’s readable to the machine.
Although it might sound appealing to use a unique barcode font, there are a few drawbacks.
First, the barcode fonts have to be installed on a computer or a server or else a designer cannot generate the barcode. This can be problematic when you start issuing documents outside of your business.
Second, you could limit how the type of barcodes that you can put on your packaging. It’s best to stick with the standard fonts, such as Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman or even Comic Sans.
Question: Have you decided on a font for your product?
This is a big decision and one you shouldn’t take lightly. The font you choose will brand your business, send an unspoken signal to shoppers about the quality of your product and integrate into your design, whether you plan on it or not. Deciding on the best label font for your goals and audience is an essential step in the design process.