Font Basics for Branding Your Small Business

Practical Font Usage Guidelines

Fonts can require special consideration when you send
materials to a professional printer for reproduction, use
them on your website, or send Word documents to others.
Here are some basics on using fonts and preserving their
appearance in these cases.

- In printed materials, it's easier to read long blocks of
copy that is set in a serif font. Sans-serif fonts are
usually used in print for short blocks of information, like
headlines, pull quotes, or bulleted lists.

- When sending your materials to be professionally printed,
make sure to address your desires regarding the use of
fonts. You can either include the fonts with the files you
send to the printer (which might be considered a copyright
license infringement), rasterize your artwork (convert it
to pixels, so the font data is no longer needed), or
outline your fonts (creating shapes out of the fonts, an
option that's available in most vector art programs such as
Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand), so that they
can be printed accurately. Outlining the fonts is the best
way to guarantee that your fonts will remain accurate and
sharp.

- Online, in websites, emails, and HTML newsletters,
sans-serif fonts look the best: they're clean, clear, and
easy to read. There is one other trick to online font use:
you have to make sure that you use fonts that will be
installed on the computers of people reading your site.
Otherwise, your text will appear in the default font
selected by their browser, which is often Courier, a very
plain font. That limitation does leave you with several
fonts to choose from, though, including Verdana, Arial,
Tahoma, and Trebuchet MS.

- Serif fonts could also be used on websites; however, it's
best to use them in limited quantities, such as for
headlines and subheads. Some fonts that are available to
use on the web include Times, Times New Roman, and Georgia.

- Another issue that commonly arises with online fonts is
the difficulty in controlling the size and appearance of
those fonts. Standard font tags in HTML don't offer precise
sizing control and need to be used several times throughout
each HTML document, so making changes can be
time-consuming. You can use Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS,
to precisely control the exact size of your fonts and to
make site-wide font, size, or color changes with one simple
alteration.

- In Word Documents, you also want to make sure that the
fonts that you use for the text will be available on the
recipient's computer. Good fonts to use are the standard
fonts that come installed on PCs, which include Arial,
Verdana, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Georgia, Palatino,
Courier, and Trebuchet MS.

- In order to insert a small amount of customized text - such
as your logo, tagline, or address information - create an
image of that information and place it in the header and
footer of the page.

- Another way to preserve the appearance of text is to
export your document as a PDF file and send it to the
recipient; PDF files embed the fonts into each document so
that they can be viewed on any computer and still look
right.

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Social Media: Experience and Article

I've been discussing Social Marketing with my clients for a while now, and have been using it on my Article-DirectorySite.com. I get a lot of blank stares (from clients) when I start trying to explain Social Media Marketing (SMM), but then I'm not that articulate when it comes to tech stuff. To cut myself a break, what geek is able to speak Greek to clients and get them to understand?

This article draws it out for you...literally, with pictures, I mean. If you have any interest and plenty of confusion about SMM, READ THIS ARTICLE on building your brand through Social Media!

I have been successful at implementing SMM though: The Article-DirectorySite.com shows up today with a Google Page Rank of 4. I'm so excited! I quit my AdWords ads two months ago, but have been adding the really excellent articles to my Profiles at StumbleUpon, Digg, del.ico.us and some others. I'm not saying it happened over night, but it's working, and when I see results like that, I'm planning on riding it all the way to the bank.

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