Just as it's important to choices about the fonts you use in your design.
As with color the fonts you choose can reveal a great deal about your company and your site and the image you want to convey to your audience. Fonts are also an important accessibility consideration for your website.
One of the most important things to understand about fonts is that not everyone has the same ones installed on their computer. The only way you can absolutely be sure your visitors will see the font you choose is to make your text an image. There are many reasons though, why this isn't a good idea and you should limit the amount of images you use to display text. It's ok for your logo. It's very bad for your main copy.
How Many Font Families Should I Use?
The web is about flexibility and your choice in which families of fonts you use should take advantage of this flexibility. Ideally you should provide options for which font your visitors will see. I like to offer an ideal font, followed by a common font, and then offer a generic font to capture all those who don't have either of the first two fonts installed. If you were coding your font famil in CSS it might look something like:
font-family: "ideal, common, generic";
font-family: "franklin gothic, verdana, sans-serif"
Browsers will display the first one they encounter on the list that's installed, so if a visitor does have your ideal font they will see it. If not they may still have the common font you specified, and if all else fails they should be able to see your generic option. It's also ok to use a different list of fonts for different elements in your design, but try to limit it.
It can become very distracting to see every heading in a different font, your navigation links in another, and your body copy in yet another font. Best practice would be to keep the total number of fonts on the page to three.
Serif? What's A Serif?
Serifs are the small decorations you'll find at the end of letters. Serif fonts are generally easier to read in print, but the situation is just the opposite on a computer monitor. At smaller size serif fonts can become unreadable and a sans-serif font is preferred. The font you are seeing now is a serif font, but to give you a comparison here is a serf font against a sans-serif font.
- This is Times New Roman a common serif font
- This is Verdana a common sans-serif font You should generally stick to a sans-serif font for your main body copy. It will be much easier for your visitors to read. You can use other color blindness. In that case the two colors will likely look more alike than you'd like. Summary And Resources Remeber that as with many other aspects of your design flexibilty is important to help make your site more accessible to a variety of people. Keep in mind that not everyone has the same fonts installed and provide options for them. Know which types of fonts are easier to read and know too that people prefer different sizes. Provide as much contrast as you can, but remember that contrast or not there are still some combinations that will prove to be difficult for some people. Here are additional resources about fonts and accessibility:
- Fonts and how they affect accessibility
- A Comparison of Two Computer Fonts: Serif versus Ornate Sans Serif
- How to gain a competitive advantage with an accessible website
- Providing value to build a business Tag: Bookmark murdok: Steven Bradley is a search engine optimization specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username vangogh, he is the author of
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