In recent years, the trend of creating “custom” fonts by brandy has strengthened. Basically there are two main reasons for which brands are going for custom-made fonts:
To keep costs down
First of all the, the most important reason for which great brands decide to create they custom fonts are high costs of licensing standard fonts. Brands such a BBC, Apple, Samsung or Nokia used to go with impression-based licencing for fonts. For them usage of in-house fonts can save millions of dollars in relatively short period of time.
To define brand personality
Secondly, typeface literally set the tone of brand. It’s not the easiest job to find the typeface with the right tone within just „off-the-shelf“ fonts. As Spiekermann clearly said: „Brand is just a fucking typeface, it’s all you need.“ Moreover in the era of different digital screens it’s important to keep font readable especially on very small screens.
Nokia introduced it’s Nokia Pure in 2011 which won Design Museum’s Designs of the Year in 2012.
In upcoming years many others followed: Google (Product Sans)…
…and Apple in 2015 and YouTube and BBC in 2017.
