Font selection
I have been involved in a lot of web designing in the past few months on a variety of projects and I am always asked to look at web designs. It is probably the best part of my job - as although I can in no way call me self a web designer I think I have a pretty firm idea of what works and doesn’t and probably more importantly I spend a lot of time looking at other websites.
One of the most important parts of web design is typography. Selection of fonts can make or break a website. Here is a few rules of thumb that I think can be applied to font selection:
1. Only use one or two fonts throughout your site. I was asked to look at one new site only a few weeks ago and there were no fewer than 4 fonts used on the one page. The page looked confused and messy. It was difficult for the reader to cast their eyes quickly over the page and digest the information.
2. The use of small font sizes should be combined with good letter spacing. I believe that using small font sizes such as 10 px is not necessarily a bad thing if combined with at least 1px letter spacing. This makes the words easy to see and easy for a reader to cast their eyes over the page.
3. If you are looking to create an expensive looking page use Georgia over Times New Roman - just my opinion!
4. Combinations of italics and bold used with the same sized font for headings and important sections can make for a stylish page. I have two favourite sites that do this very well (http://www.jontangerine.com and http://astheria.com/)
Finally, remember perhaps the most important rule in web design with regard to font selection. A font is not embedded in a web page - instead it is only rendered on the screen if it exists on the viewers computer. In this way there are really only 5 or 6 fonts that are considered safe fonts - that is fonts that appear on both apple mac and windows pc computers. The safest and most often used fonts as arial and verdana - they are sans-serif fonts, meaning they don’t have any of the loopy things between the letters like say Times New Roman and are therefore much easier to read on the web.
Tags: Web design