The most popular reason for commissioning a custom typeface is to create a bespoke brand typeface, but there are many much more practical reasons to commission a custom font. The font format is a powerful tool for your design work.
Typefaces are an important part of a branding package and they influence not only the written words but also all corners of the visual style and voice of the project. Getting a custom font or “bespoke typeface” has become a popular way to ensure that the perfect typeface is used for the brand. There are usually a few reasons for this but the main one is generally, “because they can” (see Why Custom Fonts Became The Ultimate Corporate Flex for some sassy commentary on the subject).
Many of these bespoke typefaces don’t look much different than their retail font cousins but they exist for a very practical reason: They are an asset that can be owned by the company. This can reduce a certain amount of headache associated with licensing fees or licensing missteps, which is an appealing enough reason for many organizations.
But trading “reduced licensing costs” for “font development costs” generally only benefits large companies with large budgets—for many smaller companies, it’s still likely going to be more cost effective to license a retail font. But that doesn’t mean that there is no place for custom fonts in smaller organizations or projects. We just need to get more creative with what a custom font can do for you.
I was approached by the founder at brandmark.io, a website that takes in business information and produces a computer-generated logo and brand assets. The founder wanted to expand their font options beyond Google fonts. As they explored ways to make the computer generated logos more unique, they realized they could accomplish this with more fonts that contained interesting ligatures, initial strokes, and end strokes. They hired a few different designers to each come up with unique designs and our collaboration resulted in Sahlia.
While there was more up front cost associated with commissioning this custom font, we agreed on a non-exclusive license to keep fees to a minimum. This meant that I could add Sahlia to my catalogue and make it available to other customers for licensing.
Having this font custom-made also meant that we could address some specific technical issues. The software they were using to generate the logos could not use certain opentype features so we programmed the ligatures in a way that would allow them to appear if a certain string of text was typed out in a certain order.
Page Two Books approached me for a project involving a manuscript that relied heavily on emojis—they were in need of a set of emojis that would not distract from reading when set within book text. They needed the emojis to sit well within blocks of one of my favourite text faces, Lyon Text by Kai Bernau. We examined the intended weight of the text face and designed a set of emojis that would match shape thicknesses and style of the font.
You might be thinking, “but Alanna, can’t you just make these emojis as image files and paste them into the text?” You could do that, but having the emojis in a font format makes setting them within the text super easy. All the typographer had to do was change the font where they needed an emoji and voilà, the spacing and vertical metrics were already matched with the text.
In this case, even though we weren’t designing letters, it made more sense to have them in the format of a font. Read more here!
Many of the Indigenous languages of North America are written in a Latin-based script that differ from the English alphabet only by a few diacritic marks and symbols. But language support for these under-served languages are super difficult to find in retail typefaces.
With permission from the typeface designer and foundry, I modified a copy of Dinamo’s Ginto Nord Light to include support for the Nisga’a language. I have also added support for Nuu-chah-nulth to my own Tofino Typeface for the city of Tofino.
A custom numeral set is a great way to express the visual style of a brand. These can be created like other brand graphics and kept in something like an illustrator file, but that can be difficult to use when you are setting those numerals into a piece of design work. But we have the power of fonts!
This pixel number design would have been particularly unwieldy in an illustrator file to make sure everything stayed lined up, spaced properly, and that you don't leave any of the dots behind! Working with Pendo, they sent me a couple numbers as a sample of what they were looking for and I built out the rest of the numbers and sent it back as a very easy-to-use font.
I always suggest trying to find a font that fits your needs first, but if you can’t, then reach out to a type designer! These are just a few reasons why you may need something custom: