Avoid brand fonts in digital
Let's talk about brand fonts, aka special fonts (i.e. non-Google, non-web-friendly fonts) in digital media.
I say this with love — your customers do not care about your brand font.
In any digital piece, speed and efficiency are more important than making sure your content displays with your brand font.
Users will never notice if you've used your brand font, or a random Google font, or Arial. It's never worth spending more money or taking any risks with the performance of your piece just to get your brand font in there. I promise. There's no magical, subconscious benefit to cramming a little more subtle branding in there.
The reality is, the brand font is for your clients, not the users. It makes them happy to see it. As digital professionals, we need to educate our clients about the risks and benefits of doing things that do not adhere to best practice. The use of brand fonts in digital pieces simply goes against best practice, for several reasons.
Brand fonts come with different risks for different types of digital media:
Websites
Embedding special font files incurs more dev work and more QA work. Font files can be fairly large in terms of file weight, and this hurts your page load speed and rendering time (which Google is measuring, and rewarding or punishing your site accordingly). We've all seen this: a webpage loads with an ugly default font (often Times New Roman) and then a few seconds later all the text *pops* and becomes the brand font. That was the font file (or files) downloading and rendering. This little lag is not a great user experience and can make the site feel a bit clunky or unprofessional. What's the point? It's just not worth the effort and budget.
It's not possible to embed special font files in an email, period. You could put some of your content into images and use the brand font there; this goes against best practice because A) images won't display for many users, and B) images weigh down the email and cause it to load and render slower. (Your email deployment vendor might also have a strict file size limit, and these images could cause the email to exceed that.)
What about Google fonts? Google fonts are more trouble than they're worth in email, and on top of that, Outlook users will not see them. If you're in the pharma world like I have been for much of my career, your client's legal team probably requires you to ensure that a digital piece displays exactly the same for all users, so that makes Google fonts in email simply not acceptable.
With email, you are always, always, always better off with Arial. Trust me. Look at emails from huge consumer brands. They're all Arial. If there was a good way to get a brand font to display in an email, those huge companies would have done it. And if you see a company using a Google font in their email, good for them. It won't display for Outlook users. So what's the point?
(By the way, about those big consumer brands all using Arial in their emails: you've never noticed this before, right? What does that tell you? Users don't care about fonts in advertising.)
Banner ads
The strict file limit for a typical media buy simply won't allow us to embed special font files in a banner ad. Like with emails, you could put some of your content into images and use the brand font there, but this comes with all kinds of problems. Those image files eat up a lot of valuable file weight, which may exceed the media company's file size limit. And text in images can't (easily) be set to be dynamic, so you're stuck with very static banner ads. (Also, any text changes later have to go back to art, get re-exported as new images, and implemented again in dev. It's just inefficient. For what benefit?)
What fonts should I use?
Websites: Google fonts are fantastic.
Email: Arial. For everything. Just Arial.
Banner ads: Google fonts, and/or Arial.
(When I say Arial, I mean any truly web-friendly font, but guess what: there are only about half a dozen, and they're mostly hideous. Verdana can be an okay alternative for use in emails.)
For websites and banner ads, just find a Google font that resembles your brand font. Your users will never notice the difference, especially at the relatively small font sizes we use in these pieces.
What about IVAs, convention touchscreens, etc?
Sure, embedded brand fonts are supported in these pieces. Go nuts. You're still going to incur some more dev and QA time, and you're still slowing down the rendering time of the piece a little. It's not the end of the world. There's still no benefit to the user, or to the success of the piece.
No text in images
Although it is very common in digital to see some text formatted as images, this is never best practice. Avoid doing this, every time, in any kind of digital piece. Live html text is always more beneficial, for both your users and for the success of your piece. (I guess we can say text-as-images is the least risky/impractical in IVAs and touchscreens.)
A chart or table may need to be an image — okay, that's fine. But your headlines, callouts, CTA buttons, etc, should absolutely be live html text, not images — meaning they need to use a font that's appropriate to the type of piece (as outlined above).
Let's talk to our clients about all this and keep our work efficient, streamlined, and perfectly compatible across platforms!
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.