matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

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cayennep
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matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by cayennep »

I'd like to hear thoughts on my argument that help should not have to match the company fonts exactly. I have used fonts that I think are similar (and the one that the branding guidelines suggest as well) but I don't get everything I need that way. I am using the branding color palette, fwiw.

> first and foremost, I don't think this is practical, or a good idea. It's like trying to match a book contents to the cover - they serve very different purposes and are used differently. Technical documentation needs to be 'designed' for usability/readability as #1 priority, NOT look and feel, which is secondary in my opinion. This is completely different content from the web site or other branding collateral, and different UX requirements.

> the logistics of it - eg, using Arial, which is already not an ideal choice, for everything is a really bad idea. It seems like trying to force things in a somewhat arbitrary manner that still won't serve the original purpose. also, see above - I don't have enough to work with

> what happens to PDFs, and printing? If the font is not installed, or available on the printer, is there a random substitution? That's what I've generally found.

> the 'exclude content...' setting is important for me, and I do not want to fiddle with excluding specifically - esp as I'm working with inherited content and have many other issues to address, don't want to add that
ajturnersurrey
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Re: matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by ajturnersurrey »

I am happy to go with company style (to a point).

I try to make online outputs look very close to website look-and-feel - same colours, fonts etc... ~100% on home page and >90% after that. (They did choose free to embed fonts, so I put these in a Fonts folder to call up with @font-face, and link them in a hidden way to my master page so that they do not fall foul of the 'Exclude if not linked' target setting)

I feel I have carte blanche when it comes to pdfs because my organisation does not have much 'standard' printed material. I keep similar colours to the online material, except where there are obvious usability issues. For instance I use a darker grey in print, so that it will photocopy and survive poor printers, and I don't use any whole page background colours. I choose a more suitable and smaller font for print, on accessibility grounds.
RamonS
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Re: matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by RamonS »

Having things look as if they come from the same place has its value, but similar is close enough. I guarantee you that not a single customer will drop your product because the sales cut sheet uses "Via Modern Seque Condensed" and help uses "Via Traditional Condensed" (I made up font names). In case of web help customers can fairly easily replace the original font with anything they want. I see no benefit in spending a time on styling versus adding more content that will help customers more than matching fonts.
chuck_agari
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Re: matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by chuck_agari »

I am curious what you mean by "match the company fonts exactly." And of course I have a couple of thoughts.

First, if it means matching the logo font or the font used in advertising displays, then probably not, for either body text or headings. But if there's a defined body text font the company has defined in its styles guide for its website, for its press releases, for whitepapers, and for other collateral, and it is a robust, readable font, I see little wrong with adopting it also for user assistance body text.

That said, if you're publishing web-based help systems and your company fonts are...unusual...I think you still have two good options:

- Use a common font set that is close to the company fonts.
- Embed references to the fonts in the headers of your topic pages.

The great thing about using tools such as Flare is that you should already have defined your body text and heading text styles in base selectors, so that if you're being pushed to do something you don't think is optimal, you can easily change the base selectors (just comment out the existing ones so you don't lose them) and generate proofs of concept. Heck, you can even do some A/B usability testing that way--with your users, not your office mates.

Arial is not a bad typeface, per se. It's not exciting by any stretch of the imagination, but it was designed specifically to be readable on screens, and it is not only fairly ubiquitous, it has many closely related type families that will not alter renderings sll that much for systems that do not have Arial available.

At my last company, where I was creating web-based help with a SaaS tool called HelpIQ (still waiting for MadCap to go fully SaaS with Flare, BTW, or at least release a Mac OS-native version), I defined a fairly basic set of typefaces in my CSS, but for headings, matched the RGB value to the company's primary blue, which helped identify the content as comping from that company. Doing something such as that, matching key spot colors in your content to the company colors, might make the content "feel" more like your company's content than matching the typefaces exactly.
jjw
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Re: matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by jjw »

Ah poor Flare - such a limited tool - there are so many aspects of my company's style guidelines that Flare is simply unable to render. Mysteriously, they happen to be exactly the ones that I don't like ...

Julia
RamonS
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Re: matching docs to company fonts - thoughts?

Post by RamonS »

jjw wrote:Ah poor Flare - such a limited tool - there are so many aspects of my company's style guidelines that Flare is simply unable to render. Mysteriously, they happen to be exactly the ones that I don't like ...

Julia
LOL! Be careful, they might be telling you to use Word instead and then kludge help together with tools like WebWorks.
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