23: Undressing in Public: Font Fashion
My wife bought me neon orange swim trunks; it’s hard to miss me at the pool or beach (she jokes that this was the intent). But she also picked out my best business suit. They both fit equally well; they both match my personality. But they have different appropriate environments.
Fonts are the clothing your message wears.
Like items in your wardrobe, each font has a specific appropriate range of use.
The letters that you’re spelling don’t care: they fit into Helvetica as easily as into Comic Sans. But just like conference attendees would struggle to hear my message if I lectured in my swim trunks, your advertising’s readers may disconnect from your message (your property, your auction, your company) if your words aren’t dressed correctly.
Because of an auction’s intrinsic concreteness and sense of urgency, many auction companies look only for boldness in their font choice. But not every item you sell has a bold feel. Different sale items have different moods about them.
You don’t have to take college classes (like I did) on the overt and covert connections of fonts to keep your paragraphs properly robed. You only have to ask yourself if what you’re selling matches what you’re illustrating.
Try these with that test:
It’s good to standardize the fonts you use in your advertising. They contribute to the consistency that builds your brand. You can even create style sheets or templates to ensure everyone who generates materials for you communicates what you intend.
Try to keep it to two or three fonts, total, for an entire piece. (There are exceptions but detailed and few.) Use more than that, and you risk them clashing for being too close or too unconnected—just like with more and different pieces of clothing you have in an outfit.
If you sell in several different and unrelated property markets, it might be wise to brand each line/division with its own sub template. For one firm, I have several font templates: real estate, Internet-only, luxury items, and cattle sales. For another I have predetermined sets for art, guns, and real estate. For most others, though, their subject properties are similar enough in nature to stick to one style sheet.
Like all the principles I recommend, the importance lies in the intentional use of your elements and the devotion to a consistency that will build your brand. Just make sure you don’t show up to a black tie affair in your cargo shorts or at the monster truck rally with your French-cut and your cufflinks.
[tip]
I’ve heard many times from Christian leaders that believers are the only Bible many will ever read. I have found that to be true. People far from God will only draw near to God, if your life illustrates what they think God does in someone.
The biggest knock on the church is that it is full of hypocrites. Those in our culture are actually okay with it being comprised of sinners—as long as they are authentic about their mistakes and struggles. If your message contradicts your lifestyle, your message not only goes unabsorbed; it becomes an anti-message which others will spurn.
If you are willing to be real with your shortcomings and excited about your blessings, you will earn the audience of the secular and the skeptic. If you don’t have that life—that intimate, alive relationship with Christ—because you think you have to live it perfectly, know that Jesus spoke kindly to the repentant party crowd and harshly to the religious stuffed shirts. He allowed the apostle Paul (who wrote half of the Bible’s New Testament) to condemn himself as the chief of sinners. God wants the inadequate, so that his grace and mercy shine that much brighter through the cracks in our broken lives.
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