How To Choose the Best Fonts for Your Packaging
Countless decisions go into designing your packaging—from packaging materials to colors to content and more. One decision that’s often minimalized is the font.
However, choosing a font is an important component of designing effective packaging for your brand. Here’s everything you need to know to choose the best fonts for your branded packaging.
Why Do Fonts Matter on Packaging?
While a font may seem like an insignificant decision, it’s actually something that you should put a lot of thought into. This is because fonts communicate with customers certain traits about your company.
Fonts also help build your brand image so that you can establish a recognizable brand based on font alone.
7 Things To Consider When Choosing Your Packaging Font
Here are seven things that you should consider when choosing the font for your packaging.
1. Is Your Font Easy To Read?
You need to make sure that the font you choose is easy to read. Sometimes, a font may look really cool, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out what it actually says. In this case, you need to prioritize legibility over vanity.
Other times, a font may look easy to read in some circumstances but may be harder to read in others based on the letters being used. As a result, you need to test out a wide range of different passages to make sure that the font can consistently be read.
2. Does Your Font Have Multiple Weights?
You also need to make sure that the font you choose comes in multiple different weights: For example, light, regular, semibold, and bold. This allows you to build a consistent font suite that matches but indicates differences in text.
For instance, your header should be large and bold. Your subheaders should be semibold. Your body text should be regular weight. Your callouts and quotes should be lightweight.
3. Is the Font Flexible?
The font you choose for your packaging is going to be the font you’re essentially stuck with for a long time—especially if you order your packaging in bulk. And even if you don’t, changing the font on your packaging can affect your brand recognition on the shelves.
For this reason, you need to make sure that the font you choose for your packaging is flexible enough to be used on multiple different mediums.
4. Does the Font Work With Your Packaging?
On a similar note, you also need to make sure that your packaging font actually works with the type of packaging you’re using. For instance, if you’re printing directly onto cardboard, you’re going to need a bold font that won’t easily bleed and spread on the material.
If you’re printing on plastic, you have a bit more flexibility in terms of the fonts—allowing you to use thinner and more intricate options.
5. Is Your Font Unique?
From there, you need to make sure that the font you choose for your packaging is unique and will stand out amongst a crowded field of competitors on the shelves. Check out some of the fonts used by your competitors and try to avoid using the same ones or ones that look really similar.
6. Is Your Font Memorable?
You also need to make sure that the font you choose is memorable — a quality that ties in with uniqueness. Your customers need to remember your font and automatically associate it with your brand whenever they see it.
This association boosts brand awareness and helps build a loyal customer base.
7. Does the Font Make Sense for Your Brand?
Finally, you need to make sure that your font makes sense for your brand. What do you want your brand to represent to your customers?
Consider your brand personality when making your font choice. If you don’t yet know what your brand personality is, you need to figure it out.
Start by choosing three to five adjectives that you would use to describe your brand. If you’re still not quite sure, you can take quizzes to help you. You can also create a mood board to nail down your brand personality.
Once you have a better idea of your brand personality, you can choose a font that ties into these qualities:
- If you want your brand to be approachable and trustworthy, try using a bold serif header with a sans-serif subheader like Abril Fatface, Rozha One, and Quicksand
- If you want your brand to be modern and professional, try using a single and minimal sans-serif font—playing with boldness for headers and subheaders—with fonts like Economica, Montserrat, or Source Sans Pro
- If you want your brand to be high-end and elegant, try using a thin and stylized sans-serif font like Julius Sans One, Verdana, or Playfair Display
- If you want your brand to be fun and youthful, try using a thick and rounded sans-serif font like Quicksand Bold, Fedoke One, or Open Sans
- If you want your brand to be conservative and safe, try using a single traditional serif font like EB Garamond, Baskerville, or Wire One
Where To Find the Best Fonts for Your Product Packaging?
There are so many places where you can find awesome fonts to use for your packaging. Some of these websites offer free fonts for you to use, whereas others make you pay for them.
And while free fonts may seem like the best option, it’s important to note that free doesn’t necessarily mean better. For instance, free fonts may not include special characters like hyphens, apostrophes, currency symbols, etc.
However, it definitely doesn’t hurt to check out some of the free font options to see if there’s anything you like. Here are some free font libraries for you to check out:
- Adobe Fonts
- Behance
- Colophon Foundry
- Google Fonts
- Dribble
- Urbanfonts
- Fontspace
- Dafont
If you can’t find anything you like for free, you may need to consider paying for a great font to use on your packaging. Here are some paid font libraries for you to check out:
- Creative Market
- Linotype
- MyFonts
- FontFont
- FontSpring
- House Industries
The Best Fonts for Branded Packaging
Narrowing down font options on your own can seem like an impossible task. After looking at so many, they all start to look the same. The good news is that we have gone through some of the different font options and picked our favorites to help make the process easier for you. Here are some different font options to check out:
- Best fonts for printing directly on brown cardboard boxes: Helvetica Neue Bold, Franklin Gothic, and Cooper Black
- Best fonts for printing directly on folding cartons: Futura, Pacifico, and Chunk Five
- Best fonts for lithographic printing onto cardboard boxes: NEXA Light, Seaside Resort, and Museo Slab
Final Thoughts on Choosing Packaging Fonts
Once you have your font figured out, it’s time to put all the other components together to create your packaging. Thanks to Box Genie, this process is easy with design tools that you can use to build the perfect custom packaging solutions for your brand.
If the design isn’t your thing, you can also access pre-made templates for inspiration. Check out our design showcase here or reach out for personalized design advice.
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