In designing custom typographic brandmarks I always wonder how other designers approach the choice of companion fonts for letterhead and business card. Do you have hard and fast rules? If the brandmark is clearly based on a font do you try to match the companion type to it? If you contrast to the brandmark do you have a distinct philosophy for how you contrast your choice, or is it intuitive?
And what do you do when the brandmark is its own child of the universe with no clear relationship to existing fonts? The majority of my work needs to be highly proprietary and so I usually create the logo without reference to typefaces. I find these situations the trickiest, and sometimes get pressure from a client to go with a conservative font-based option because they think it makes the job of choosing the letterhead fonts easier. How much thought do you give to how the custom typographic design will fit with typesetting--and does that concern modify your design process? My own choices are usually very intuitive, and based on a hard-to-codify aesthetic of color/weight/stylistic feel and usually more based on contrast than similarity.
