Packaging gets seconds. Advertising gets less. Entertainment gets a thumbnail surrounded by thousands of other thumbnails. A custom font for packaging, advertising or entertainment gives the words a fighting chance. It can make a title recognisable before the logo arrives and keep a campaign connected as it moves from a six-sheet poster to a six-inch screen. The job is not to make every letter shout. The job is to make the right voice impossible to confuse with anyone else’s. Distinctive beats loud.
Packaging: win the shelf before explaining the product
Packaging typography has to identify, persuade and inform in very little space. It may need to work across flavours, sizes, legal copy, promotional bursts and badly lit supermarket shelves.
A custom display font can give the range a recognisable voice without placing the logo on every available surface. Brand-specific alternates, numerals and symbols can keep new products consistent while allowing enough variation to prevent the range becoming a row of identical cousins.
Useful considerations for packaging
- Legibility at small sizes
- Impact at normal viewing distance
- Narrow or wide variants for awkward panels
- Clear numerals for weights, prices and percentages
- Language support for different markets
- Print behaviour on coated, uncoated or textured materials
A beautiful alphabet that collapses beside the ingredients list is only doing half a shift.
Advertising: build recognition across changing ideas
Campaigns change. The brand should not disappear every time the art direction does.
A custom font can carry a recognisable tone across posters, social content, digital ads, outdoor sites and motion graphics. It gives creative teams a repeatable asset rather than asking them to invent a new typographic trick for every brief.
That consistency can also create freedom. When the typography already belongs to the brand, photography, colour and layout can change more confidently around it.
Entertainment: give the title a world of its own
Film, television, games and streaming projects often need type to establish a world before the audience has heard a line of dialogue.
A title may need menace, speed, humour, nostalgia or glorious bad taste. It then has to expand into episode graphics, trailers, menus, social promotion, merchandise and international versions.
Sometimes the right answer is a full font. Sometimes it is custom lettering for one title. The difference matters. There is no prize for drawing 300 characters that nobody will use.
Start with the production reality
Before drawing, establish:
- Where the type will appear
- The smallest and largest sizes
- Whether it must animate
- Required languages and territories
- Any fixed launch or broadcast dates
- Who needs access to the font files
- Whether the design must work beyond the first campaign
The more glamorous the launch, the less glamorous it is to discover the font lacks the euro sign twelve minutes before delivery.
Character without chaos
My work often begins with physical material: ink, paint, print, cut paper and imperfect lettering. That gives packaging and entertainment projects a texture that does not feel selected from a menu.
It is then turned into a working digital tool. Characters are drawn as a related system, spacing is refined and the typeface is tested in the layouts it must survive.
Handmade is the source. Professional is the delivery.
Why choose an independent designer?
The largest type studios are set up for global programmes with enterprise budgets, multiple scripts and many departments. If that is the project, use that strength.
For a focused campaign, product range or entertainment title, working directly with an independent designer can be quicker, more flexible and more personal. There is no account team translating the idea before it reaches the person drawing. The conversations stay close to the work, and the work keeps more of its character.
I have spent more than twenty years working across design, advertising, entertainment and visual culture, with work created for brands and organisations including Reebok, ITV, Three, King and NEX Playground. I understand that the type cannot merely look good in an alphabet specimen. It has to earn its space.
Make the words part of the idea
Packaging, advertising and entertainment all compete for attention. Most of them use type. Very few use type that could belong to nobody else.
If your next project needs more than a fashionable font and a hopeful drop shadow, let us make something with its own voice. Talk to me about custom font design for your project.