Another important issue when designing a logo or brand is the selection of the typography. Every company, product or service must be identified by the logo typography.

The fact of communicating ideas visually goes back to the ancient Egypt. Egyptians used aligned figures and symbols. The origin of our letters goes back to the ancient Greece where written symbols were also lined up to create words and transmit messages. The word alphabet is a Greek word which is formed by two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta.

Graphic designers use letters to convey messages through words and they also use them as images. The different typographies are used everyday in books, magazines, Internet, etc. The aim of the typography is to make the message suitable for its target audience: to be functional, to communicate, to transmit.

A good logo must be easy to remember; it must be immediately impacting, and this impact must be log-lasting. There are two elements for logos: images and letters. A logo can be comprised by only one of these elements, or by a reasonable combination of the two. In the case the logo is formed by both elements, either the image or the letters can be the most outstanding one in the logo. Typography forms can be altered in order to make it suitable for the logo; an existing typography can be used or a new one can be created specially for a specific logo.

There are different ways of combining images with typography to form logos:

The text can be adapted to curves and forms: it can skirt round a shape or it can be placed inside an object.

Cliparts and dingbats can be easily incorporated and they can also be modified if necessary.

The use of clichéd typography will make the logo memorable. Many designers decide to take clichéd typographies and play with their forms by modifying them or adding graphs, in order to make them look original but, at the same time, familiar. Some companies have logotypes with no images; their logo is formed by existing typographies that have suffered some modifications or retouches. Think of Coca-Cola for instance.

If letters are only the starting point of a more complex logo, there are specialized illustration programs to make modifications which are limited only by the designer’s creativity. In order to make these modifications, it is necessary to turn the elements into editable shapes: this means texts must be turned into vector objects to manipulate them. Logos are generally developed with the usual illustration programs: Freehand, CorelDraw, Xara, Illustrator. Many of the techniques for vector illustrations that this programs offer are accurate for logo designs. Calligraphers usually create beautiful illustrations from letter characters, using them as graphic elements (as leaves, houses, people). The mentioned illustration programs are suitable for this work.

Typographies are divided into two groups:

Roman typography was based on perfect circles and balanced lineal forms. Rounded letters such as o, c, p, b, etc, are bigger because, when these and other letters are put together in a word, they look smaller than the others.

With no serif: better known as sans serif, this typography has no serif, and today they are used in different types of texts. However, sans serif letters are not frequently used in large texts since typographies with serif make the reading easier.

You may think that all this is superfluous; that in the end, they are just letters and that nobody will pay attention to the details. But many times, designers know little about the importance of typography and the load of meaning they carry, and, for this reason, their designs are poor or unsuccessful.