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I remember driving with my parents to New York (A trip worth forgetting with mom at the helm and her uncanny ability to miss important turns) when I was about 12 years old or so. We were on I-95 in Stamford, CT and the agony of the trip was starting to wear on me as was the funk of the empty McDonalds Big Mac wrapper sitting on the floor next to me. I glanced out the passenger window as we were cruising in the passing lane going 45mph and saw something that sparked my interest. It was a billboard. Now I had seen many billboards in the past but this one erased my ADD temporarily and I just stared at it with an unparalleled curiosity until we passed it. The billboard was a picture of the typical cartoon chiseled handsome guy in sunglasses and it said only two words – Ray Ban. We all know about Tom Cruise and his emerging role in Risky Business around that time but I wasn’t as enamored by the coolness of the sunglasses as much as I was the words – Ray Ban. The words were just downright beautiful. It wasn’t a script or sans-serif text (At that time I thought curvy or flat). I just started thinking about how in the world someone wrote that. How did they create that text? I needed to know. Back then there weren’t affordable personal computers with fancy system and custom fonts installed on them like we have today. There were no online type foundries to buy and download fonts where you can just type letters and they magically appear in that format. I realized that it was art just like a painting or photography. There was obviously a process and creative tools involved. I became fascinated by it all.

Over the years I have become a type junkie. From my first purchase of Adobe’s Font Folio to browsing font foundries and free font sites to keep up with what is in and what is not. Much of it is personal preference so what I find sexy and trendy in typography someone may not and that’s good. If we all had the same thought on what worked in typography there would be parity in design and everything would look the same. The beauty is that no one is right or wrong. Unless you use Comic Sans, then I will just write you off and most likely never speak to you again.

Let’s put the importance of typography in perspective. Can you imagine the difficulty of creating innovative and unique logos if we didn’t have a strategy for typography and its impact in our designs? Let’s take a look at Ray Ban and create an example assuming they weren’t worried about typography and its presentation for their product.

Which one do you like better?

Would you spend $100 for a pair of sunglasses if the logo looked like the one on the right? I would maybe spend $5.99 and make sure I accompany them with a neon green wife beater that has a glitter iron-on that says “Keep On Truckin”. A company’s logo has such a large impact on a buyers trust that businesses will charge more money for a product. They know that a well designed logo is an integral part of a relevant branding initiative and will entice buyers to remove the psychological price impact when making a purchase. If you are a business looking for a new logo to refresh your brand or a designer looking to help these businesses think of typography as one of the pillars needed to build a proper brand identity.