Make It May: A Whimsical Color Font for Playful Branding
I was staring at a blank brand board last Tuesday, tasked with refreshing the visual identity for a local artisanal bakery that wanted to pivot from "rustic and serious" to "joyful and approachable." The client's mood board was awash in soft lavenders, mint greens, and buttery yellows. I needed a typeface that didn't just sit on the page but brought its own palette to the party. That's when I pulled Make It May out of my library. As a designer who usually relies on safe, monochrome sans serifs for legibility, working with this full-color font felt like swapping a pencil for a box of crayons.
Make It May is not your standard black-and-white typeface. It is a whimsical sans serif lettering system designed specifically as a Color Font. Upon installation, it behaves like any normal .otf file, but the magic happens when you start typing. Each character arrives pre-filled with pastel gradients and subtle textures, instantly injecting personality into your layout. What sets it apart in a crowded market of decorative fonts is the inclusion of an alternate case. This feature provides additional color variations for every letter, giving you the flexibility to tweak the rhythm and flow of a word without needing to manually recolor glyphs in Illustrator.
Testing Make It May on Real Brand Assets
The first test was the logo concept. For the bakery project, I typed out the business name using the default style. The immediate impact was striking; the pastel hues eliminated the need for a separate icon or complex graphic element. The font was the graphic. However, a common pitfall with display fonts is monotony. If every letter looks exactly the same, the word can feel static. This is where the alt case in Make It May proved invaluable. By swapping a few letters to their alternate colorways, I created a subtle, hand-painted variation that made the logo feel organic and bespoke rather than digitally uniform.
Moving beyond the logo, I applied the typeface to packaging mockups. On a matte-finish cookie tin, the soft colors of the font popped beautifully against the neutral background. Unlike standard fonts where you have to worry about ink coverage or Pantone matching costs, this premium font handles the color theory for you. The SVG technology ensures that the gradients remain crisp whether printed on a large storefront sign or a small product label. I also tested it on business cards. Here, caution is required. Because the font carries so much visual weight and color information, it works best as a primary headline or logo mark. Trying to squeeze contact details or addresses into Make It May would be a mistake; it is strictly a display font, not suited for body copy or small print sizes where legibility is paramount.
Digital Performance and Social Media
In the digital realm, Make It May shines just as brightly. I dropped the typeface into a website header for a hypothetical skincare line. The load time was negligible, and the vector-based SVG format ensured it looked sharp on high-DPI retina displays. For social media graphics, particularly Instagram stories and Pinterest pins, this font is a powerhouse. Content creators often spend minutes adding drop shadows or gradients to text to make it readable against photos. With Make It May, that work is done before you even open Photoshop. The inherent contrast of the pastel fills against white space makes it highly engaging for scrolling audiences.
However, accessibility remains a key consideration for any web designer. While the colors are delightful, ensure there is sufficient contrast between the font and your background. On a light gray background, some of the lighter pastel yellows in the set might get lost. In my testing, I found it performed best on white or very dark charcoal backgrounds, where the colors could truly sing without competing for attention.
Pairing and Typography Systems
A font this expressive needs a quiet partner. You cannot pair Make It May with another decorative script or a loud display font; the result would be visual chaos. During the branding project, I paired it with a clean, geometric sans serif font for the subheadings and body text. This created a modern typography system where the whimsical nature of the main title was grounded by the professionalism of the supporting type. Alternatively, for a more editorial look in a magazine spread or a lookbook, pairing it with a classic serif font adds a touch of sophistication that balances the playfulness of the pastels.
It is important to remember that Make It May is an OpenType full-color SVG font. This means it requires software that supports these features, such as recent versions of Adobe Creative Cloud applications. It installs like a standard font, but if you are handing off files to a printer or a client who uses older software, you may need to outline the text or provide a flattened PDF to ensure the colors render correctly. Always check your workflow compatibility before committing to it for a large-scale commercial project.
Limitations and Best Practices
While I love the energy this typeface brings, it isn't a solution for every design problem. If you are designing a legal document, a corporate annual report, or a minimalist tech startup landing page that demands stark seriousness, Make It May is likely the wrong choice. Its whimsical, pastel aesthetic screams "creative," "handmade," and "friendly." It is perfect for bakeries, children's products, craft fairs, beauty brands, and lifestyle blogs, but it would feel out of place in a law firm's branding.
Before finalizing any client work, always review the licensing agreement. While many designers purchase fonts for personal use, commercial projects involving merchandise, packaging, or wide-distribution digital products often require an extended license. Ensure you have the right to use the font in your specific context, especially if you are creating templates for sale or logos for trademarking.
Ultimately, Make It May is a tool that accelerates the creative process. It allows you to skip the coloring phase and jump straight into composition and layout. By offering a built-in palette and alternate characters, it gives designers the freedom to experiment with mood and tone instantly. Whether you are a freelancer looking to spice up a social media post or a studio building a comprehensive brand identity, this font offers a unique blend of convenience and charm that is hard to replicate with standard black-and-white typefaces.
