Why we settle the typeface before the colour
In our projects the palette arrives late and the typeface very early. That order is not a studio preference: it follows from what each material can actually carry.
On our identity projects the colour palette arrives late. Often during the third week, sometimes later still. The typeface, by contrast, is chosen in the first few days. That order is not studio affectation: it follows from what each of the two materials can carry, and from how quickly a team can agree on it.
Colour wins agreement too fast
Show three palettes to an executive committee: the debate starts within ten seconds and is over in ten minutes. Everyone has an opinion, everyone states it, and that opinion is almost always personal. The blue recalls a competitor, the green is liked, the orange worries. None of it can be demonstrated.
Typography produces the opposite effect. Set alone on a page, it leaves most people with no immediate reaction. That silence is valuable: it forces looking. We use it to ask the real questions. Does this text read as an established house or a young service? Does it hold as well at 9 point on a quote as at 80 point on a building? Does it survive German, with its long words, if the company opens a subsidiary next year?
The typeface decides more surfaces
Across all the touchpoints of a services company, colour rarely occupies more than ten per cent of the visible surface. The rest is text, and therefore type design. A contract, an invoice, a payment reminder, an instruction sheet, an internal dashboard: all of it is typographic and none of it will ever be coloured.
Choosing the typeface first therefore means deciding first about what will be looked at longest. We have made a habit of testing directions on the client's least glorious documents. A two-hundred-row price list says more about the sturdiness of a type family than a poster does.
What we check before going further
The extent of the family. Three weights do not make a system. We look for at least five weights, genuinely drawn italics rather than mechanical obliques, and tabular figures if the company produces tables.
Behaviour at small sizes. Many contemporary typefaces are drawn for headlines. Below 11 point their contrast closes up and the grey of the page turns dirty.
The licence. A magnificent typeface whose web licence costs a four-figure annual budget is not a good choice for a company of thirty people. We price the licence before showing the direction, never after.
Availability as a variable font. It reduces the weight loaded and allows fine adjustments across screen sizes. Not a decisive criterion, but it counts on a project where performance matters.
Colour comes next, and it comes constrained
Once the typeface is settled, the palette is no longer a free exercise. It has to serve text whose grey, density and rhythms we already know. Contrast is then calculated on real cases: this body size, on this background, at this size, against this minimum ratio.
That constraint simplifies the discussion enormously. A colour is no longer kept because it is liked, but because it holds inside the system already in place. Debates about taste do not disappear; they become arbitrable.
One exception, and only one
A brand sometimes already owns a colour in its customers' minds. A farm equipment company whose green is recognised at a hundred metres has no business putting that green back in play. In that case colour is an inherited asset rather than a decision to make, and we start from it.
Outside that exception the order has been the same since we began. The typeface first, because it carries the text, because it is expensive to change and because it structures everything else. Colour after, because it is better decided once there is something to colour.