For years, commissioning a custom typeface was something mostly associated with very big brands and very big budgets. That is changing. Today, more businesses are realising that custom typeface isn’t just about making letters look nicer. It’s about giving a brand a voice that feels like its own.
It can give a brand a recognisable voice, simplify licensing, improve consistency and solve very practical problems across websites, apps, packaging and advertising. So when does it make sense to commission a custom font rather than buy one off the shelf?
A logo might appear once on a page, but type can appear hundreds of times.
That makes type one of the hardest-working parts of any visual identity.
Every headline, button, price, menu, product description, presentation and Instagram graphic is quietly reinforcing how a company looks and feels. Yet typography is often treated as an afterthought: choose something vaguely appropriate, buy a licence and move on.
That can work perfectly well. There are thousands of excellent retail fonts available.
But when five competing businesses all choose broadly similar geometric sans serifs, their visual voices inevitably start to blur together.
A custom typeface gives a brand the opportunity to own more of that voice.
Your typeface is doing more branding than you think
Strip away the photographs, colours and logo from a piece of communication and what remains?
Usually, words.
A typeface can feel authoritative or informal, expensive or accessible, technical or human, elegant or deliberately awkward. Small decisions involving proportions, spacing, curves and terminals collectively give written language a personality.
Most customers will never consciously analyse those details. They don't need to.
Think about handwriting. You can often recognise someone's handwriting immediately without being able to explain exactly why. Typography works in a similar way. Repeated exposure to a distinctive style builds familiarity.
The customer doesn't have to know the name of your font for it to become part of how they recognise your brand.
Spotify: when the font becomes part of the product
Spotify provides a good example of custom typography moving beyond the traditional world of advertising and brand guidelines.
In 2024, Spotify introduced Spotify Mix, a bespoke variable typeface developed with Dinamo. Instead of simply appearing on campaign posters, the typeface was designed to work throughout Spotify's actual product.
That means typography used on playlists, interfaces and navigation can share the same visual language as advertising, events and wider brand communication.
It's an important distinction.
The font isn't something applied to the brand afterwards. It becomes part of the thing customers interact with every day.
Spotify Mix also uses variable font technology, allowing considerably more flexibility than a traditional family made from a handful of fixed weights.
Netflix: one typeface doing lots of different jobs
Netflix demonstrates another reason large companies commission their own typography: scale.
Netflix Sans needed to work across enormously different environments. One moment it might be a huge headline advertising a new series; the next it is displaying episode information or navigation on a phone or television screen.
Those are very different typographic jobs.
At small sizes, clarity becomes crucial. Numerals, punctuation, spacing and letterforms need to remain legible across different devices and screen resolutions. At large sizes, the same family still needs enough personality to feel like Netflix.
And once a company operates internationally, another layer appears: language support.
A corporate typeface may require hundreds or thousands of additional characters, accents, symbols and different writing systems.
At that point a font is no longer just a collection of nice-looking letters.
It is software.
DHL: custom type as practical housekeeping
One of my favourite arguments for custom typography is considerably less glamorous.
DHL had accumulated more than twenty different typefaces across its communications before developing its Delivery family.
Think about how easily that happens inside a large company.
Someone chooses a font for presentations. An agency licenses another for a campaign. The website uses something different. An overseas office substitutes another font because it doesn't contain the characters they need. Then the app team introduces something else.
After a few years, the supposedly simple solution becomes a typographic cupboard full of odd socks.
DHL's custom family helped bring those applications back into one coherent system, designed to work everywhere from relatively small digital interfaces to enormous delivery vehicles.
That isn't typography as decoration.
It's typography as simplification.
Then there is the boring bit: font licensing
Font licensing isn't particularly sexy, but it can be one of the strongest commercial arguments for commissioning a bespoke typeface.
A commercial font licence may distinguish between desktop use, websites, apps, digital advertising, broadcasting, packaging and other applications. Pricing can also vary according to the number of users, website traffic or size of an organisation.
For a small business, none of this may be particularly troublesome.
For a global company working with multiple agencies, products, apps and thousands of employees, it can become considerably more complicated.
Commissioning a font can change that equation.
The exact ownership and licensing agreement will vary from project to project. A custom font doesn't automatically mean the client owns every conceivable right to the design.
But it does mean the licence can be created around the company's actual needs rather than continually trying to squeeze those needs into somebody else's retail licence.
So the meaningful comparison isn't necessarily:
“Why commission a typeface when I can buy a font for £50?”
A better question might be:
“What will this organisation spend licensing and managing typography over the next five or ten years?”
For some companies, those are very different numbers.
Lush: building a font from the brand
Not every bespoke typeface needs to look polished and corporate.
Lush is a great example.
The company had already developed a distinctive handwritten, chalkboard-inspired visual style across its shops and packaging. The problem was reproducing that character consistently across an international business.
The solution was to turn that handmade quality into a working typeface system.
Lush Handwritten retained the imperfect personality of real lettering while allowing it to be used repeatedly across packaging, websites, apps and marketing.
This is one of the most interesting things a custom font can do.
A brand can begin with something it already owns visually:
- Handwriting
- Old packaging
- Signage
- A wordmark or logo
- Historical lettering
- Industrial markings
- Printed ephemera
Those references can become ingredients for an entirely new type system.
You aren't choosing a font that happens to resemble your brand.
You're building a font from your brand.
Custom fonts can solve boring problems too
It's easy to talk about custom typography purely in terms of personality and branding, but some of the most useful bespoke type work solves remarkably practical problems.
A financial company might need numerals that remain unmistakable at very small sizes. An airline needs flight numbers that cannot easily be confused. A software company might need highly legible text inside a dense interface. An international organisation may need dozens of languages to feel like members of the same visual family.
Other requirements might include:
- Narrower characters to fit more information on screen
- Tabular numerals for prices, statistics or financial data
- Special currency symbols
- Improved readability at very small sizes
- Very large display styles for advertising
- Characters designed specifically for a company's name
- Additional languages and writing systems
- Fonts optimised for websites or applications
These aren't usually the bits that get shown in glamorous branding presentations.
But they're often the bits that make a custom typeface genuinely useful.
Variable fonts have changed what is possible
Variable font technology has also made bespoke type particularly interesting for digital brands.
Traditionally, a font family might contain separate files for Light, Regular, Medium, Bold and Black.
A variable font can contain a continuous range between those extremes inside one font file.
Width can also become variable. Instead of choosing between Condensed and Regular, designers may have access to everything in between.
That opens up some interesting possibilities.
Typography can become slightly narrower when space is limited. Headlines can expand as a browser window becomes wider. Animation can move smoothly between different weights. A designer can select precisely the amount of boldness a particular layout needs rather than being restricted to five predetermined options.
Not every company needs any of that.
But increasingly, type doesn't live on a fixed piece of paper. It lives inside responsive, animated and interactive environments.
Does every business need a custom font?
No.
There are thousands of brilliant retail typefaces available, and for many businesses buying one of those will be exactly the right decision.
A startup with a limited budget probably shouldn't spend a large chunk of it developing an enormous bespoke family if a carefully chosen commercial font will solve the problem perfectly well.
And commissioning a custom font simply because Spotify or Netflix has one isn't much of a strategy.
There should be a problem worth solving.
Custom font design starts making more sense when:
- Typography appears extensively throughout your product or communications.
- Your existing font feels too generic.
- Your competitors use very similar typography.
- Licensing has become expensive or complicated.
- You operate across numerous countries and languages.
- Your product has unusual technical requirements.
- Your brand already contains visual material that could inspire a typeface.
- Different teams or agencies are using inconsistent fonts.
- You're undertaking a substantial rebrand.
- You want typography to become a recognisable part of the identity.
The more of those boxes you tick, the stronger the argument becomes.
You don't always have to start from scratch
There is also a useful middle ground between buying an existing font and commissioning an entirely original family.
An existing typeface can sometimes be modified.
Individual characters can be redrawn. Widths can be changed. New weights can be added. Language support can be extended. Spacing can be adapted to a particular product. Distinctive characters inspired by a company's logo or existing identity can be introduced.
For some businesses, that provides exactly the right level of ownership and individuality without requiring a completely new design.
There isn't one correct route.
There's simply the route that solves the problem.
So what happens when you commission a custom font?
You don't need to turn up knowing whether you want a humanist grotesque with a 12-degree italic and slightly eccentric terminals.
That would be worrying.
The first conversation should be much closer to discussing a brand than discussing the finer points of type design.
What should the company feel like? Where will the font be used? Who will be reading it? What isn't working with the typography you currently use?
Does it need to feel serious or playful? Contemporary or established? Human or engineered? Quiet or attention-grabbing?
Then come the practical requirements:
- Which languages are needed?
- How many weights?
- Are italics required?
- Does the family need condensed styles?
- Will there be separate display and text versions?
- Would variable font technology be useful?
- Are unusual symbols or characters required?
- Will the font appear in an app?
- On packaging?
- On television?
- Will outside agencies need to use it?
Those questions gradually determine the size of the project.
Start with the idea, not thousands of characters
A sensible custom type project doesn't begin by drawing thousands of glyphs.
It begins by finding the personality.
A surprisingly small group of letters can reveal much of a typeface's DNA. Characters such as H, O, n, o, a, g, R and S quickly expose decisions about proportions, curves, stroke weight, terminals and overall character.
Those letters can then be tested using real words from the brand.
Too serious? Warm it up.
Too generic? Push some of the character.
Too wide for the intended interface? Adjust the proportions.
Only once the direction feels right does it make sense to build out the larger system.
Because a font isn't simply a folder containing individually attractive letters.
Every character has to work with every other character across thousands and thousands of possible words.
The best custom fonts don't always look custom
This sounds contradictory, but a bespoke typeface doesn't necessarily need to be eccentric.
Trying to make every letter distinctive is a very quick way to make a font exhausting to read.
The trick is deciding where the personality lives.
Perhaps it's the lowercase a. The tail of the Q. A slightly unusual R. The numerals. The terminals. The proportions. Or simply the rhythm created when the letters sit together.
A handful of distinctive characteristics can create recognition while the rest of the alphabet quietly gets on with being useful.
Netflix and Lush demonstrate the two extremes rather nicely.
Netflix needs thousands of words inside an interface to feel effortlessly like Netflix. Lush can be much more visibly expressive because handmade lettering is already part of the company's character.
Both are custom typefaces.
They're simply solving different problems.
Think of a custom font as brand infrastructure
This is perhaps the most useful way to think about bespoke typography.
A custom font isn't merely another asset stuck at the back of a brand guidelines PDF.
Done properly, it becomes a tool used throughout the organisation.
Designers use it. Developers use it. Marketing teams use it. Agencies use it. Websites use it. Apps use it. Packaging uses it.
Customers may spend hours reading it without consciously thinking about it once.
Campaign photography changes. Layouts evolve. Websites get redesigned. Advertising comes and goes.
Typography can quietly connect all of those things.
The question isn't “Do we need our own font?”
A better question is:
“Could typography work harder for our brand than it does today?”
Sometimes the answer will be no.
Choose a brilliant retail font, licence it properly and spend the money somewhere else.
But sometimes the compromises begin to accumulate.
The current typeface feels generic. The licence is awkward. The interface needs something narrower. International teams need more languages. The marketing department wants more personality. Designers keep modifying the font to make it work. The brand looks slightly different everywhere it appears.
At that point, commissioning a custom typeface stops looking extravagant.
It starts looking practical.
Companies aren't simply commissioning prettier letters.
They're creating a visual language that can belong to the brand for years.
A logo tells people who you are. A custom typeface gives you a voice every time you speak.
Thinking about commissioning a custom font?
A custom typeface doesn't have to mean an enormous global rebrand or a five-year project. It might begin with a distinctive display face, modifications to an existing design or a focused family built specifically around the places your brand communicates.
I design custom fonts and bespoke typefaces for branding, advertising, packaging, digital products and entertainment. The character, weights, language support and technical requirements are developed around the project rather than forcing the brand into an off-the-shelf solution.
If your current typography feels generic, inconsistent or simply doesn't quite sound like you, tell me about your project.
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