Type choices are the most revealing indicator of a designer’s depth. Not because some typefaces are more prestigious than others, but because selecting the right one requires a specific kind of research.
You have to understand the client’s industry, their customer’s reading habits, the media in which the type will appear, the emotion the brand needs to convey, and the practical constraints of production and licensing. Then you have to find a typeface that threads all of those needles.
Most designers skip this research and reach for what’s familiar.
The Overused List
There are typefaces that appear in every project because they’re safe and familiar, not because they’re right. Designers know the list. It gets longer every year as AI tools canonize whatever defaults their training data contained.
The danger isn’t that these typefaces are bad. Some of them are genuinely excellent. The danger is that using them without specific reason communicates nothing distinctive about the brand. When everything uses the same type, type communicates nothing.
The Research Process
Before touching a typeface, we spend time with the brief. What does this company do, and how does the best version of it behave? What is the history of visual communication in this category? What is the competition doing, and what is the opportunity created by what they’re not doing?
Then we build a shortlist. Not one typeface, but six or eight, from different sources, with different characters. We test them in context — at the size they’ll actually appear, in the colors they’ll actually live in, next to the imagery they’ll sit beside.
Typography tested in context looks different from typography tested in a style guide spread.
Type as Differentiator
The brands that feel most themselves have type that serves their particular personality rather than a generic one. Vogue and The Economist both use serif type, but you would never confuse one for the other. The type is doing specific work in both cases.
This level of differentiation requires that designers actually have opinions about type. Not preferences — opinions. The ability to articulate why this typeface at this weight in this context is exactly right and another nearly-identical choice would be wrong.
That’s the skill. Not knowing all the names, but understanding the differences that matter.
Elena Marchetti is Creative Director and Founder of ATELIER. She teaches graduate seminars in brand systems at the School of Visual Arts.