Fonts for the Web

The fonts you use on your website will influence visitors impressions of you. Formal, Casual, Serious, White Collar, Blue Collar, Friendly, Fun can all be conveyed by font choice and size. The creation of fonts is called typography and it is a skilled trade with roots that go way, way back. Fonts for digital viewing are a specialized branch of this art.

One of the requests I receive most often is to use a non standard font for the body of a website. There are a very limited number of fonts that will display on most computers. When a website is created, a font (or better yet, a font family) is specified with a tag. Tags are instuctions written into html code that are not visible to human viewers. These tags instuct the users computer how to display components of a webpage (text in this case).

Fonts need to be legible, scalable and (this is VERY important) they must reside on the receiving computer. If a font is specified that is not installed on a viewers’ computer, that computer attempts to “guess” what the font might be like or uses the default font for viewing. It is a mistake to specify typefaces that are specialty fonts not intended for body copy and best used in headlines as a graphic (like the samples of type image below).

Fonts are broken down into two main categories - serif and sans serif. Serif typefaces have the little lines at the edges of each letter. San serif are plain. Times Roman is a serif typeface, Arial is a san serif face. There are also three much less used families - Cursive, Fantasy and Monotype.

As you cannot tell which fonts are installed on a viewers computer, you can specify a font family. This tag will include a list of similar fonts and the viewers computer will use the first font in the list that it understands.

What you have to say is important - make sure that the font doesn’t interfere with your viewers ability to read your message.