On choosing typefaces for clients who know nothing about type

Last year a client told us their new wordmark felt "too serious." They were right, and we had chosen the typeface knowing this risk. What surprised us was not the feedback — it was that we agreed with it immediately and had been unable to articulate the problem ourselves.

This happens. Typography is a discipline that rewards systematic thinking but is ultimately about felt experience, and felt experience is hard to reason about in advance.

The brief beneath the brief

Every client has a stated position on type, even clients who have never consciously thought about it. It usually emerges somewhere in the first conversation, buried in a description of how they want to be perceived.

"Professional but approachable" almost always means a humanist sans with open apertures and a moderate weight range — Aktiv Grotesk, GT Walsheim, something in that register. "Premium and considered" tends to want a contemporary serif with restraint in the italics. "Technical and precise" reaches toward geometric sans territory, sometimes with a monospace for accents.

These are generalisations, and generalisations in typography will eventually fail you. But they are a useful starting point precisely because they can be tested and disproved.

The thing clients are actually responding to

Most clients cannot evaluate a typeface. They can evaluate a sentence set in a typeface, provided the sentence is one they recognise as relevant to their world. This is why we stopped showing type specimens in client presentations years ago and started showing the actual brand name, actual tagline, and actual sample body copy set in three or four contenders.

The feedback changes completely. "I don't like that one" becomes "that one feels too casual for what we do" — and suddenly there is something to work with.

Licensing, practically

One thing that does not come up enough in design conversations: variable fonts have made the licensing question more complicated and the typographic possibilities considerably more interesting. We now consider variable options early in the process on any project with an active digital presence, because the performance and flexibility benefits compound over time in ways that a static font purchase does not.

For most clients, this requires no explanation. We make the recommendation, we explain the practical benefit, and we move on. The details live in the design system documentation for whoever inherits the work.

The honest answer

There is no systematic process that reliably produces the right typeface choice. There is informed taste, accumulated experience, careful listening to the brief, and the willingness to change your mind when a first choice reveals its weaknesses in context.

The client who told us the wordmark felt too serious was right. We recut it in a slightly warmer face — same proportions, different texture — and the problem resolved. That is not a failure of process. It is the process working as it should: iteratively, with honesty on both sides.