You might be inspired by creativity, or simply the availability of all those fabulous fonts that come with your desktop publishing or word processing software on your computer—but, as a small home business owner without the likely benefit of a graphic design team to keep you on track, you might be tempted to use font and “typeface” in your marketing and business materials that will actually be a TURN OFF to customers and prospects.
As always, you’ll want to keep your target market and demographic in mind. The younger the market, the more likely they will be able to read and respond to smaller font size and more creative types of font. For adults, say forty and older, you will want to definitely consider that the smaller, crowded font will be difficult to read. Keep it simple and large enough to make it easy for people to peruse and read important points at a glance. This generally means 10 and 12-point font size.
There are other things to think about in designing your marketing materials and business correspondence—make sure that it is EASY to read—black type on white background is the easiest. If you decide to go with colored paper or a colored screen background (and this goes for e-mail too), make sure you are using a dark, bold font color that can be easily deciphered. Clarity over artistic style makes better sense when we’re dealing with business correspondence.
One big mistake beginners often make is to try to crowd in more words—making the margins narrower and the font size smaller so that they can fit more text onto a page. This actually makes it less likely that individuals will read the materials. Learning how to condense your message using stronger words will make your marketing more powerful, and keeping plenty of white space and big enough font will make it more accessible to customers and prospects.
See Also: Fresh “Copy” Is Important
Making the Most of Your E-mail Signature