One of the key steps in establishing your brand is bringing it online with a memorable website. It’s important to choose a name that will appeal to potential customers and users while also presenting your brand in the best light. This week’s #WebsiteWednesday will introduce you to three .xyz adopters who established brands for their typography services with expertly branded domain names: Undercase.xyz, FutureFonts.xyz, TypeSpecimens.xyz. Each one utilizes a unique strategy to establish a creative brand, and can help inspire you when creating your new website.
Undercase.xyz – GoDaddy customer (United States)
Sharing the story of your brand helps you make a more memorable and emotional connection with your target audience. Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi, the founders of font design and distribution service Undercase.xyz, use this storytelling marketing strategy immediately on their homepage. The first thing you’ll learn from Undercase.xyz is about the brand’s creation, when Phaedra and Flavia met at the Type@Cooper Extended Program and began their partnership. They also introduce themselves and their impressive past experience. Phaedra is a former partner at a boutique typographic and illustration studio. Flavia has collaborated with renowned foundries like Frere-Jones, Commercial Type, and AdobeFonts, and was the first Brazilian woman to have a typeface awarded by the Type Directors Club in 2018.
After using the homepage to make a deeper connection with the audience, Undercase.xyz uses clear call-to-action buttons to note where to purchase or download custom fonts. The site also cleverly uses a black and white color scheme to reinforce the “typeface” theme of the brand. Flavia and Phaedra complete their branding with a very memorable and perfect name for their industry, Undercase.xyz.
FutureFonts.xyz – eNom/Open SRS customer (United States)
FutureFonts.xyz, as you may be able to tell from their descriptive brand name, is a forward-thinking font foundry. They specialize in fresh fonts that are new to the market. Their modern marketing approach can be seen in their use of a subdomain, Hypertext.FutureFonts.xyz, to showcase their separate offering of special “hypertext” fonts. They created these fonts utilizing pop culture references as a celebration of font culture. This allows them to use their well-branded domain name to launch a new product category and create a dedicated page for it. Using their domain this way also makes the URL easy to remember, so customers can easily navigate to the hypertext offerings FutureFonts.xyz has.
The FutureFonts.xyz website itself employs a very modern and bold look, which immediately grabs site visitors’ attention. They feature a host of font contributors from around the world, along with a photo, location, and taste of each one’s personal style on the Foundries page. FutureFonts.xyz also features journal posts with updates from the members of their font foundry service. This touch of personalization is a great way to get customers to engage with the FutureFonts.xyz website regularly.
TypeSpecimens.xyz – GoDaddy customer (United Kingdom)
Mark Boulton is a design director, writer, and speaker who uses his website, TypeSpecimens.xyz, to curate type specimens and journal his thoughts on them. Mark has labeled the TypeSpecimens.xyz service as a “research & design project, a publication, and a community resource.” The website provides a list of type specimens, which are created by font designers as tools to help other designers choose fonts and make stylistic choices. Mark then draws on his experience working with clients like Conde Nast, Al Jazeera, and ESPN to analyze these specimens. In his posts, Mark investigates the specimens’ usefulness as marketing tools and muses on their effect on “type culture.” This unique angle helps Mark make his service stand out by offering a new perspective on the industry.
Mark shares most of his thoughts on these specimens and their cultural impact in his journal, and also provides a link to sign up for the TypeSpecimens.xyz newsletter featuring “specimens, interviews, blog posts and more.” The keyword TypeSpecimens.xyz domain exactly matches Mark’s niche service as well. Securing a domain name that exactly matches your product as Mark did helps make your URL more memorable.
These three typographers show that incorporating personal style, helpful features, and creative use of your domain name are all ways to differentiate your unique service in a large industry. When you start with a branded .xyz domain, as these entrepreneurs did, you make it easier to promote your website and have potential customers remember it. A memorable and short domain also gives your service an extra air of professionalism that can help attract clients.
XYZ is proud to share about the many incredible members that make up the XYZ community! We encourage you to do your own research before using the products and services of the websites we feature. The information about products and services contained in this blog post does not constitute endorsement or recommendation by XYZ.
