Choosing the right font for your web design
The choice of font is an important part of the web design process. It conveys something about the “feel” of your site just as much as your choice of colors. Choosing the right font (or combination of fonts) will make your content stand out and naturally draw your readers’ attention. Choosing the wrong font, on the other hand, can make your content difficult to read, and will turn off many potential readers.
So how do you go about picking the right font? Since there are only a handful of “web safe” fonts to choose from, our options are rather limited. Sure, there are CSS tricks to dynamically load fonts, but they don’t work across all browsers. There’s also sIFR, but that relies on Javascript and Flash, which you can’t guarantee all your site’s visitors will have enabled. You can also create images if you want to use a fancy font in your header, but that’s not a practical solution for the main content of your site.
The only way that we can really guarantee our content will render the same across browsers is to choose from the list of “web safe” fonts:
- Arial
- Arial Black
- Comic Sans MS
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Impact
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
One of my favorite tools for testing out different fonts is Typetester. It allows you to input custom text, and then compare the output between up to 3 different fonts. You can specify other parameters such as foreground/background colors, size, spacing, tracking, and text decoration.
In the end, choice of font really comes down to personal preference. The key thing to keep in mind when choosing fonts is readability: is the font easily readable? The size of the text has a lot to do with how readable a specific font is. Verdana is easier to read at small text sizes than other fonts, but it doesn’t look so great when it’s at a larger size. These are the types of things you need to consider when deciding what fonts to use for your site design.
In addition to your choice of text size and line spacing, choosing the right font can have a huge impact on the readability of your site. And if your visitors can’t read your site, they won’t be sticking around for long.
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