I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Liz Mosley on her podcast Building Your Brand — episode 237 — for a conversation about something I genuinely love talking about: the relationship between type design and branding, and why the fonts you choose say far more about your brand than most people realise.

We covered a lot of ground — from the technical obsessions that come with designing typefaces, to the very practical question of how a small business owner with no design budget can still make a strong typographic choice. Here are some of the things we got into.

Typography is everywhere — and that's exactly why it matters

When Liz asked me why typography is so important, my honest first reaction was: where do you even start? It's on every poster, every billboard, every book, every screen. It surrounds us so completely that we stop seeing it — which is actually the mark of good type design. When it works, you don't notice it. When it doesn't, something just feels off, even if you can't say why.

That discomfort is real. Anyone who has ever tried to read a book set in the wrong typeface knows the feeling — the eye keeps snagging, the reading slows, the experience becomes friction instead of flow. Typography done well removes that friction entirely.

Font choice is branding — whether you think about it or not

One of the things Liz said during our conversation that I completely agree with: if you're a small business owner who can't yet afford a full branding project, one of the most impactful things you can do is invest in the right typeface.

Even just having your business name set in a font that genuinely reflects your personality — something legible, something with a point of view — is a meaningful brand decision. It communicates taste. It communicates intention. And it costs a fraction of what a full brand identity does.

Type is one of the few design decisions where a relatively small investment can do a disproportionate amount of work. The right typeface doesn't just set your name — it sets a tone.

Typeface vs. font — and why the distinction is less important than you think

Liz asked me to clear up the font vs. typeface debate, which comes up constantly. My honest answer: it matters less than the type community sometimes makes it seem.

The clearest explanation I've heard comes from fellow type designer Jennifer Wagner — a single egg is a font, and the whole box of eggs is a typeface. One is the individual file (say, the Bold Italic), the other is the entire family. Simple enough.

But in everyday conversation? Use whichever word feels natural. Any type designer who corrects you mid-sentence is missing the point.

A typeface is never just one beautiful letter

This is something I feel strongly about, and it came up naturally in our conversation. There's a quote I love from type designer Victor Baltus: a typeface is not a collection of beautiful letters — it's a beautiful collection of letters.

That distinction is everything. You can draw one stunning glyph, and that's closer to illustration. But a typeface has to work as a system — every letter interacting with every other letter, across every weight, at every size. That's where the real craft lives. And it's also why kerning — the process of adjusting the spacing between individual letter pairs — is one of the most painstaking parts of the job. It's not something you can fully automate. At some point, you have to trust your eye.

Context is everything

A typeface that works beautifully on a billboard could fall apart in a book. The thin strokes that look elegant at large sizes become invisible at small ones. The personality that reads as editorial at display size becomes illegible at body text.

This is one of the things that makes type design genuinely difficult — and it's also why picking a typeface for your brand isn't as simple as finding something pretty. You need to think about where it will actually live, and whether it will hold up in all those contexts.

On breaking the rules

We also talked about font pairing — combining two typefaces that don't seem like obvious companions on paper, but work beautifully in practice. I'm genuinely all for it. Some of my favourite pairing combinations are the ones that shouldn't work and absolutely do.

But — and this is the part that matters — you have to know the rules before you break them. Understanding why certain typefaces work together is what lets you make unexpected combinations that feel intentional rather than accidental.

The full conversation

Liz and I talked about a lot more than I can cover here — including some of the more personal parts of my own journey through design, and what it really means to build a working life around something you love.

You can listen to the full episode on Building Your Brand, episode 237. It was a genuinely enjoyable conversation with one of the most thoughtful voices in the design and branding space, and I hope you find something useful in it.