The case for boring typefaces
Most brand-identity work fails not because the typeface choice was wrong, but because designers treated the choice as a chance to be interesting.
Most brand-identity work fails not because the typeface choice was wrong, but because designers treated the choice as a chance to be interesting.
The first instinct when a brand redesigns its identity is to reach for an interesting typeface. A new face. A revival from the 1920s. A weird custom thing the designer commissioned from a studio in Berlin. Almost always wrong.
The job of the typeface inside a brand identity is not to be the interesting thing. The interesting thing is the brand. The typeface is the voice that carries it. When the voice itself is interesting, you stop hearing what's being said.
Helvetica is the standard example. It was designed in 1957 to be a neutral grotesk — Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas Type Foundry building a typeface that did not have a strong opinion about itself. The pitch to the market was that you could use Helvetica anywhere. It would behave.
The reason Helvetica is everywhere now is not that it is a great typeface. It is that it gets out of the way. American Airlines used it for forty years. Toyota used it. The New York City subway uses Helvetica on its signage and most riders never notice. That is the point. The typeface is doing its job by not being something you remember.
The argument I keep hearing against Helvetica is that it is overused. That argument confuses two questions. "Is this typeface still functional?" is a different question from "is this typeface still novel?" Helvetica is no longer novel. It is, in most contexts, still functional.
Most brand briefs ask for a typeface that is "memorable." That is the wrong word. What the brief usually means is "distinctive in a way that supports the brand's character." Those are not synonyms.
A typeface that is memorable in itself competes with the brand for attention. You see the typeface first and then you remember the brand. That is backward. The brand is supposed to be the figure and the typeface the ground.
The brands that get this right tend to use boring typefaces in striking compositions. Apple uses San Francisco — a competent neutral sans they commissioned in 2014. The typeface itself is not memorable. The way Apple uses it is. Their wordmark, their headlines, the spacing of their packaging — all of it is doing the work that a more interesting typeface might have tried to do alone.
The rule of thumb I use: if I can describe the typeface as "distinctive" before I can describe the brand it serves, the typeface is too loud.
A boring typeface is not a typeface without character. It is a typeface whose character is restraint. The good neutral grotesks — Akzidenz, Univers, Inter, Söhne — all have personality. You can tell them apart at large sizes. But the personality is consistent enough that you can use them across a wide range of contexts without the typeface arguing back.
What you buy with a boring typeface:
When I'm helping a team pick a typeface, I run two tests.
First: set the brand's longest plausible piece of body copy in the typeface at the smallest plausible size. Not the wordmark. Not the marketing site headline. The 12pt paragraph in a footer disclosure. If that paragraph is hard to read, the typeface is wrong, no matter how good the wordmark looks.
Second: set the brand's name in the typeface next to a competitor's name in their typeface. If the competitor's brand looks more like itself than yours does, you are using the wrong typeface. Your job is to make the brand recognizable from across the room. A typeface that fades into the visual category — that looks like all the others — is doing nothing for you.
Most rebrands fail the second test. The team picks something neutral that the competitors are also using because it felt safe in the boardroom. The result is a brand that is harder to distinguish than the one it replaced. That is not boring done right. That is boring without the strategic restraint that makes boring work.
Boring is not the absence of choice. It is a specific, defensible choice. The reason it looks like nothing is that it took everything to get there.
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