A large part of branding is being able to trigger deep portions of people’s memory to make your company feel familiar and trustworthy. Doctors may or may not remember your company name when they hear it or see it in print. This is why we use logos to enhance the memorability of your brand. Slogans also enhance this memorability. Companies with the most sophisticated branding strategies also use fonts to support their branding.
Yes, fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana). A familiar font scheme will help trigger doctors’ and patients’ memories about your home health agency or physical therapy practice. It will help your agency or practice feel more familiar and trustworthy to doctors and patients. This is not to say that everyone should use Arial and Times New Roman because these are the most common fonts. In fact the opposite is true. Businesses should develop their own font schemes unique to their company. Times New Roman and Arial are attractive fonts, and they are safe from a design perspective. People are so accustomed to them, they usually look good. However, Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana are also so common that they are essentially generic fonts. It would be hard for these fonts to help support your branding, because people see them all the time (For technical reasons, they tend to be the standard fonts on websites).
Home health agencies, physical therapy practices and other health care providers who do a fair amount of work in print should choose a font scheme that represents their company. Once this font scheme is established, administrators must notify every employee of the new branding standard – current employees and incoming employees. Your corporate font scheme should be used not only in all your promotional materials (e.g. ads, brochures, business cards); it should also be used in standard communications such as letters, memos, and fax cover sheets.
Your font scheme should consist of three fonts. Each font is for different purposes in layout.
- Headers – a font that looks good big and is used for titles, headers, and other text that is usually larger than the body text
- Body Font – a font that is used in the main text of documents
- Sub-Font – this is optional, but it is nice to have a font that you typically used for small or fine print
You have a large list of fonts from which to choose. Consider the overall image that you try to project as part of your comprehensive branding strategy. Do you portray your business as professional, friendly, established, old-fashined, modern, etc? There are different fonts for each of these looks. You should also consider limiting the fonts in your corporate font scheme to fonts that Microsoft installs for free with their software. While there are many more fonts out there, these fonts are commonly available and will be available to people in your office now and in the future. If you choose fonts that are too uncommon, you will need to learn how to buy fonts and install fonts on each computer in your office. While that’s easy to do for an experienced computer user, that’s often more trouble than it’s worth for busy executives. In addition, if you choose fonts that are too uncommon, you will find yourself in future situations where designers want to charge you $300 and $400 extra to buy your unusual fonts and use them.
In summary, consistent use of a corporate font scheme enhances branding. Choose fonts that don’t look too much like everything else so your font scheme will be unique to your company, but don’t choose fonts that are so unusual that they will create burdens in the future.
