At PosterMyWall, we aim to give you the tools you need to create professionally designed content that inspires, teaches and sells. We want to give you limitless choices with typography so you can use your favorite fonts, or your brand’s fonts to create brand graphics that are easily identifiable by your audience.
Custom fonts is a part of PosterMyWall’s Premium subscription plans, allowing you to upload any number of fonts in .OTF or .TTF formats.
If you’re part of a team, you can easily share your custom fonts with the team if they’re part of your Team Space. You can invite your coworkers to your subscription plan via the Premium Billing page.
Using custom fonts for branding
Before we dive into the best practices for using fonts, it’s important to create a distinction between fonts and typefaces. Fonts are what you see in the font menu, i.e, a particular weight and style of text. Encompassing a whole list of fonts is a typeface. A typeface is a family of similar looking fonts, each used for different purposes. Here are some basic typefaces used in graphic design:
- Serif
- Sans serif
- Modern/Display
- Script
- Monospaced
If you’re interested in learning more than the basics about each typeface, read this guide on type classifications.
To get to our main point, if you’re part of an enterprise, big and small, custom fonts are a great way to enhance your branding efforts. Here’s how:
Fonts create brand recognition
Every brand has a distinct look, enhanced by the fonts they use for their logo and general communications. Think Coca Cola with their overly stylistic script font, Honda with their red, bold and heavy display font and Google with a uniform stroked, straight forward, yet colorful sans serif font.
There are hundreds of thousands of fonts and weights out there for you to choose and use to give your brand a new look. Which font tells your story?
Typefaces express emotions
Recall the typefaces we discussed earlier into the blog post. A study was conducted where 500 participants looked at a variety of fonts, and assigned each font a personality trait. Many fonts of a single typeface were boxed together with a common personality trait.
Here are some personality traits that were commonly associated with each typeface:
- Serif fonts were perceived as ‘stable’, ‘practical’, and ‘mature’.
- Sans serif fonts weren’t given any consistent associations.
- Script fonts were perceived as ‘feminine’, ‘funny’, and ‘casual’.
- Modern fonts were perceived as ‘masculine’, ‘assertive’, and ‘coarse’.
- Monospaced fonts were perceived as ‘dull’, ‘plain’, and “unimaginative”.
Choose your typeface based on the perception you want to create for your brand. Is your brand for women, men or both? Political or neutral? For adults or children? Depending on your answer, there will be a typeface out there, just for you.
Communicate your offer in more ways
Fonts can be subtle, impactful, playful, serious and much more. Sometimes the League Spartan font isn’t a good fit for your sale poster, and you need a font that’s even more impactful. Custom fonts allow you to take your design in unlimited directions, allowing you to create more expressive designs.
Looking for new, expressive fonts to add to your custom fonts arsenal? The following font lists are just the thing you need:
Create designs in every language
You can use non-English fonts to create text content in your language. We recommend fonts specific to your language script to get the best results. You’ll find fonts for a variety of language scripts, but with custom fonts, you can greatly expand on the font options available to you. You can add fonts for scripts we currently do not offer fonts to create designs with any language text (provided the fonts added are compatible with your language script).
Now let’s see how you can use custom fonts in your designs.
How to use custom fonts?
Note: Designers cannot publish templates that use custom fonts in the PosterMyWall Gallery.
To use custom fonts, open a design in the PosterMyWall editor. In the editor page, select a text item, then select ‘Font’ on the left column, and you’ll find the ‘Upload and Manage Fonts’ option below ‘My Fonts’. Use this option to upload .OTF and .TTF fonts from your device into the editor.
Uploaded fonts will always remain in your account unless specifically removed.
Ready to start using custom fonts? Here are some resources to find free fonts for your next project:
Once you’ve downloaded your fonts, head over to the My Stuff page to start creating your branded content.
Now, you can easily browse through font options and pick a font that’s on-brand. In the editor’s right sidebar, you’ll find the option to search for a specific font or filter and search for fonts based on category. Find out more here.
Senior editor at PosterMyWall.
