Fonts, like images, beautiful colors and a user-friendly navigation, are a design choice. A font can either enhance or detract from the theme and feeling of your web design. Successful web designers understand this and know or learn which typefaces are most effective. The rules in the web environment are anything but arbitrary so they need to be followed if a website is to engage the reader rather than turn them away.



There are a lot of fonts out there, so many that choosing a font for your website can be overwhelming. However, the choice is important. Certainly you want people to read the useful content provided on your site. The intricate details of a font – such as weight, kerning, axes, strokes and counters – affect how we read, although we are rarely conscious of it. The font that you choose could determine how much text is read and how effective your site is.

Yes, there are thousands of fonts from which to choose but only a few are successful on the web. Readability and availability are the issues. First, consider the difference between two popular font types: serif and sans serif.

Serif or sans serif

Serif fonts are fonts that have fine cross lines at the ends of the letters. Because the lines make each character more distinctive, serif text is typically easier to read in print, but generally harder to read on a monitor, particularly at smaller sizes. Serif fonts have been used for centuries in printed books, magazines and newspapers. Consider a serif font for your website if you wish to convey qualities like warm, personal, artistic, distinguished, traditional, conservative or intellectual. Serif fonts are effective as headings or for text and documents intended to be downloaded and printed. The most common serif font is Times New Roman and just happens to be the default for most windows-based browsers.

Sans means ‘without’ in French, so naturally a sans-serif font doesn’t have the embellishments at the end of each stroke. Sans serif fonts are generally thought to be better for the web. This was particularly true when computer screens didn’t have a high enough resolution to capture the fine details of the serifs. They could appear blurred and unclear. Even today, on a screen, sans serif fonts appear more readable. Sans serif fonts convey qualities like technical, cool, clean, crisp, youthful, modern or uncluttered. The most popular web font at the moment seems to be Verdana. It is a sans serif font and looks good on both PCs and Macs. Because of this, it is one of the most popular, widely-used fonts on the web.

Availability constrained by technology

Some fonts look better on PCs (such as Arial), while others are best viewed on Macs (like Helvetica and Geneva). The range of fonts that webmasters can reliably select for their pages is not as wide as you may think. In addition to avoiding serif fonts (perhaps less of a requirement with today’s hardware), web designers have long been limited by what fonts website users have installed on their computers.

The list of universally available fonts is slowly growing, with additional fonts such as Cambria and Candara coming into the picture. In an ideal world, all fonts would be loaded onto all systems to open up design possibilities. Until then, conventional wisdom suggests that you use Web safe fonts from the following table:

Serif





San Serif









Monospace





By selecting one or more of these fonts for your web site, you will be able to somewhat control how your text will appear in most browsers. Using Cascading Style Sheets, which is the underlying technology used by a web page to control its appearance, web designers can specify a list of fonts to be used. In CSS your font-family code might look something like:

p{font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif}

The first three fonts are pretty common and chances are most computers will have at least one installed, but in case one doesn’t you have provided a generic sans-serif font for the browser to use.

Technology advances

Google Web fonts are an amazing free resource for web designers as seen at the ZolamanDesign. Web fonts make a website more beautiful, readable, accessible and open. This is a newer approach that makes it quick and easy for everyone to use a broader selection of Web fonts. With over 500 font families and counting, Google’s API service makes it easy to add Web fonts to a website in seconds. The service runs on Google’s servers which are fast, reliable and tested. Google provides this service free of charge.

Breaking the rules

Occasionally, there will be times when the “artist” in us desires to break the design rules. Thus, if you absolutely want to ensure your text displays in a specific font you will need to make that text an image. Just be aware that if you want to make any changes to the content at all, you’re going to have to edit the image itself, which is much more tedious than going in and editing text. This should be done sparingly as search engines won’t recognize the text in the image. Using images for your text will also increase the download time of your pages. However, there are places where it’s appropriate to use an image to display text. A good example would be your company logo.

Remember you are the designer

While fonts may not seem as important a design element as color and graphics, thoughtful
consideration should go into your selections. The fonts will convey important information about your company, products and services. They will help visitors successfully navigate your site and interact with you. Most important, the right fonts will contribute to your site’s overall visitor experience. If the impact is positive, your content will be read and you have made the right choices.

Source: http://www.zolamandesign.com/tutorial/daily-tips

Nice and informative post. Thanks alot