Why forward-thinking font planning pays off
With great digital presence comes the great responsibility of protecting your digital assets. Fonts stand bravely at the frontlines of your organization’s brand, valiantly broadcasting its values at every touchpoint. Therein lies the question - how does a brand protect its fonts so the fonts can speak for the brand?
What are the key font needs that all brands have in common?
In terms of design, fonts reinforce a brand’s aesthetic, and a custom font can help your brand stand out from the crowd. In terms of licenses, properly procured fonts can prevent misuse, fraud, and compatibility problems. However, the visual and license goals take shape, all brands have one thing in common – the need for reliable fonts with reliable coverage.
What is “reliable,” actually?
When talking about fonts, “reliable” means different things to different teams across an organization. For legal, it might refer to fonts licensed for your organization’s exact use; for IT, it may mean font files that are virus-free and compatible with active servers, channels, and platforms; for marketing, it could allude to aesthetic and adaptability features that maintain a consistent look across different use cases.
Combined, each of these provide the answer to a key question about font needs: does your organization’s font solution cover what you need in the present as well as what you will need in the foreseeable future?
Why should your business think about now and later?
Building a reliable font solution for your organization requires a holistic and forward-thinking approach. It’s not just how your business uses fonts today, but how it expects to use them in the future. A font solution that doesn’t keep up with a company’s goals can lead to misuse, glitches, and gaps. Too often, these issues snowball, waste resources, and ultimately deter would-be customers.
If expansions, acquisitions and marketing campaigns are on the horizon, font licenses must be ready for spikes in relevant metrics, otherwise they can cause extra work for legal, procurement, IT, and marketing teams. Ensuring your font solution will continue to work for planned expansions means investing in coverage that accounts for expected increases in certain metrics, such as website impressions, desktop users, or production fonts.
As a company grows, these requirements change in different ways for each team, calling for a reliable font strategy that considers anticipated changes. For instance, launching a new mobile application or marketing campaign to draw new users and more website visitors are both indicators that a font coverage check is in order.
How to check your font coverage in 3 steps:
1. Check your current font coverage by reviewing the relevant font license agreement(s).
2. Consider your future font use plans. Assess how any upcoming marketing campaigns, acquisitions or expansions might impact metrics used in your font license agreements.
3. Conclude if your current font coverage can be expected to cover your future font use plans
3.1 Yes – pat yourself on the back, you are all set!
3.2 No – reach out to your font provider to update your agreement sooner rather than later.
Who benefits from anticipatory and ample font coverage?
Reinforcing the adage, ‘it’s better to have and not need than to need and not have,’ when it comes to font coverage, it is always better to secure appropriate font licenses before you need them rather than after compliance gaps have arisen. On a team-by-team level, anticipatory and ample font coverage creates a positive ripple which benefits a company.
IT Teams benefit from fonts that are secure, compatible with intended use, and won’t ‘break.’ But if they do, having infrastructure in place that alerts them to issues allows them to resolve the problem before they hinder users makes all the difference. They will thank you for investing in reputably sourced software designed for their intended use which eliminates the risk of viruses and rendering problems.
Asset Procurement and Legal Teams appreciate an asset-licensing strategy that proactively protects their organization from compliance issues. As a company grows in scale, keeping track of their fonts, let alone usage and permissions, can very quickly snowball into an asset-management nightmare. With Monotype Fonts, all your licenses are represented in one comprehensive licensing agreement, helping to expediate the process of checking font permissions which will cover current and future use.
Marketing Teams are unleashed by the flexibility that comes with having more font coverage than your organization needs at present. Rather than working according to existing usage permissions, an ample font coverage plan opens doors of possibility on how they can build brand equity. With Monotype Fonts, users have over 150,000 secure fonts at their fingertips with innovative search tools and customizable folders so creatives can categorize these digital assets in a way that suits their specific branding needs.
The most important consideration, of course, is the customer experience. On a design level, fonts influence emotions and can help organizations connect with their desired audience; That connection can be easily severed when a virus or phishing scam uses your fonts for malicious purposes. Unlike OpenSource fonts which are easy and ‘free’ to download but leave you open to malware problems, while premium fonts are harder to imitate and therefore better for building brand equity and a safer online space for customers!
Clearly, ensuring your fonts and font coverage are continually reliable helps keep your teams working proactively so your organization can thrive and continually build trust with its audience. If you are unsure if your font solution is future-proofed for your business, reach out to us at [email protected].