Walk into a high-end hotel and look at the font on the menu. Now walk into a fast food restaurant and look at theirs. You didn't need to read the prices to know which one was expensive. The font told you.
Typography is the silent communicator of your brand. It conveys personality, price point, and professionalism before a single word is processed. And most small businesses are using fonts that are actively working against them.
The biggest offenders: Comic Sans (obviously), but also over-used "safe" fonts that scream 'I picked the default' — generic sans-serifs at default weights, or worse, decorative script fonts used everywhere with zero hierarchy.
What good brand typography actually requires:
- A display font — used for headlines, big statements, your brand name. This is your personality. Choose something with character.
- A body font — used for paragraphs, captions, descriptions. This needs to be readable above all else. Pair it to contrast with your display font.
- Consistent sizing hierarchy — your headline is always larger than your subhead, which is always larger than your body. Break this and everything looks amateurish.
- Stick to two fonts maximum. Three is pushing it. Four is a crime.
Free resources to fix this today: Google Fonts has hundreds of beautiful, free, web-ready fonts. Fontpair.co shows you curated pairings. Type-scale.com generates a consistent sizing hierarchy from a single base size.
You don't need to spend money to fix your typography. You need 30 minutes and intention.