Learning The Art of Using Safe Web Fonts
How many of us are particular about design etiquettes while creating a new website? I would say everyone; no matter it is a corporate one, an eCommerce site or a free blog you are designing. You go by what your heart says, what your eye soothes and what you feel looking at again and again.
Designing your first ever website is like decorating your home for your newly born baby.
It is always special… And, it is always sensitive.
Launching a new website passes through many rituals. Font selection is one of the most critical tasks among them. Whether you concentrate on layouts, colours, images or other CSS basics, without having the right set of fonts, the whole design could be a super flop. Typography plays a major role in web design.
So, how will you like to proceed?
It is never easy to find the right fonts at one go. You may have the collection of the best fonts to be used in grunge style design. Creating grungy design is fun, but your site needs cleaner approach. Artsy design elements cannot replace the importance of clear presentation of content. Whatever content you put on a site it must be easy on eyes and readable.
The problem is, in order to make a visually attractive site designers end up choosing a stylish font that has poor readability. This leads to high bounce rate and loss of repeat visitors.
So, what are the best fonts you can use?
To be frank, there is no dearth of great fonts available on web. You can use any of them on your site for free. It is so easy and quick. Just Google out popular web fonts that you like, download them all and apply to your website. A little mix and match may work wonderful here. We will chart a few of them in the later part of this article.
What is most important is – how quick you can identify and apply the best suited one that satisfies all font selection criteria. Only safe web fonts are acceptable.
Believe it or not, most of us spend hours in selecting a single font type. This is a real brainstorming activity and many of us give up in the middle. It is important that you don’t experiment with fonts too much.
Here are a few checkpoints you can use to expedite the process.
Readability: Choose a font that does not solely depend on font family or vary from one another. Old school font, Georgia, Arial, Courier New, Trebuchet MS are a few examples that are preinstalled on computer.
Portability: Web font that can be easily read over any platform and on any computing machine is the apt one. You should not use a font that people need to install first and then view.
High visibility: Fonts that are easily visible in different text colours are the perfect fit. You may need to change font colour a bit depending on the colour scheme used in different sections of the website.
Text size: Size of the text is also a major constraint while designing a web page. A good font is visible even at smaller sizes.
Spacing: maintaining gap (space) between words or letters is another thing one should consider highly important. Having enough spaces within texts makes your site look organised, clean and expressive.
Line height:
The height of every individual line should be well managed so that they don’t appear too close to the next line. Adequate space in between two consecutive lines can offer better readability.
Following these basics will help you play a safe game. However, if you like experimenting a bit with fonts and want to know emerging trends in typography as an enthusiast, you can always do that.
Web Typography trends to follow:
With the adoption of @font-faceCSS rule and web font service bureaus there are now around 50,000 fonts that effectively work on almost all web browsers. The good news is that even IE (Internet explorer) has supported web fonts since version 4.
If you are creating a web 2.0 site or a personal blog, following web typography trend of 2012 would be of good use. A few popular trends are as follows:
- Larger font sizes
- Slab serif fonts
- LetterPress and other text based shadow effects
- Colour Contrast
- Mixing Font height
- Adequate space
- Responsive typography
- Handwritten fonts
There are a different users opinion as far as usability of these fonts are concerned– both good and bad. However, applying them in a case-specific way can avoid further confusions. In a nut shell, 2011 was all about experimentation (wait and watch) and 2012 is about application.
Finally, it is your decision how you want to use web typography for the best of the results. Make sure anything you do must be welcomed by your readers. They should complement the overall design and spend valuable time on your site.
Author Bio:
William Johnson belongs to the most creative field of digital media – Web Design. William offers helpful information on magento web design for his set of readers in the Cardiff area. He suggests you to visit Big Eye Deers to know more about web development and Magento eCommerce.
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