Our Guide to Fonts
26 November 2015
Everything on the online world begins with text. If you want to communicate with visitors to your website, you will likely do it using text. When we start talking about typography people generally think of big, fancy headers.
Everything on the online world begins with text. If you want to communicate with visitors to your website, you will likely do it using text. When we start talking about typography people generally think of big, fancy headers. However, in this blog we will be discussing with you paragraph fonts, because paragraphs contain the meat of your content. Here’s our little guide to online fonts.
Web Safe Fonts
Web safe fonts are those that are pre-installed by many operating systems. While not all systems have the same fonts installed, you can use a web safe font stack to choose several fonts that look similar, and are installed on the various systems that you want to support.
Serif and Sans-Serif
Consider the following characters. The first set is Times New Roman, a commonly used serif font; the second is set in Arial, a commonly used sans-serif font.
Notice the small decorative flourishes at the ends of the strokes in Times New Roman. These are called serif. The right character does not have these strokes, which makes it a sans-serif font. It’s generally (although not universally) accepted that sans-serif fonts are more legible in their use on websites than in print.
Google Fonts
Google Fonts (previously known as Google Web Fonts) is an interactive directory of free hosted application programming interfaces for web fonts. Launched in 2010 and revamped in 2011, Google Fonts is designed to provide a platform for users to discover fonts. It is used broadly, and example font faces include Lato, Raleway, and Lobster. They work by referencing the font from Google (via CSS) meaning that a machine does not need the font installed for it to be displayed.
Fonts to avoid ?
Nothing makes a web developer’s skin crawl quite like the words ‘Comic Sans’... Comic Sans is one of the most frequently used fonts in the world. For a much-used font, however, it is widely loathed and ridiculed for one big reason: people use Comic Sans everywhere without much thought or care. There is a widespread disgruntlement over the extensive use of the font, especially its incongruous use for writing on serious subjects. A campaign was even started by two Indianapolis graphic designers, Dave and Holly Combs.
In web design, originality counts for a lot, and fresh and innovative designs should always be experimented with. Here at Wida we will help you find fonts that are suitable for your website, without being boring or predictable! After all, if people hate the font, there are much less likely to enjoy the words.