The webinar I attended was Monotype’s “Why Type” presented by James Fooks, a Senior Director and Tom Foley, a Creative Type Director. Their webinar was about the relevance and importance of type as it pertains to branding, further addressing how its crafting and execution is crucial to a brand’s identity. The biggest takeaway I got from this webinar was that type primarily serves two purposes, aesthetic, and function. It shapes a brand’s aesthetic through its distinctiveness which enhances a brand’s recognition and memorability and consequently, expands their reach. It does so by embodying enough personality and carry a voice or an emotion that can connect with the brand’s customers. The relatability factor of a type’s aesthetic is one of the utmost important because it allows for its transcendence, through cultures, orders, languages, beliefs, age, time, surfaces, technology and trends.

With the ever-evolving nature of brands, it is essential for type in its function to be able to adapt to the needs of the consumers regarding how it engages with the spectrum of audiences worldwide, whoever and wherever they are. A key element it achieves this is through legibility and accessibility, type must be clearly readable through any medium and on every platform it is presented, “making the cognitive burden as light and bearable as possible.” This was highlighted in the Santander project, in which they were tasked to create and design a new font family for the banking company,  in order to better communicate their message to their customers

The webinar also addressed the perception of type on both a global and local scale where the presenters referenced a project they worked on for Sony, which was led by Kira Kobayashi. The project highlighted the transcendental aspect of type and how it allows for inclusivity through its transcending and transferring of personality and meaning across cultures. Another client for whom this was essential to was Chinese technology and entertainment company, Tencent, who aimed to extend their brand from their native Far East to the West.

As a graphic designer, I profoundly related to the teaching of Fooks and Foley, because type has slowly become one of my favorite design components to work. With my work predominantly focusing on corporate branding, I have a deep understanding of how much a major element type is to the success of a company. As highlighted in the webinar, “good type improves experience which consequently enhances customer loyalty and therefore creates revenue. Also I particularly related to the arduous of finding and researching the best fitting for a project and the numerous test trials and prototyping when developing and engineering a type.