If you wanted to count all the fonts that are available for web design, you’d be counting until next Christmas. There is even a font for us Calgarians, it’s called the Calgary font. The possibilities are endless, which can be a blessing or a curse. Yes, it’s a blessing because there is definitely a font out there for you, but it’s a curse because there are probably 500 fonts our there for you, and you should only use a few of them.
Fonts are generally created by a typographer or typeface designer, if you really can’t choose a typeface from the myriad out there, you can always contact a web designer to have one made for you, but that can get awfully pricey. Thankfully, the fine folks here at Sparrow Studios have created a very basic guide to choosing the best font for your website.
First up are serif fonts. The letters in serif have little lines or embellishments attached to the end of their letters. In the past serifs were commonly thought of as a print font as they were easier to read in print than on the web. Now a days, screen resolution has gotten much better and so has how serif fonts look online, putting them back in vogue online. Examples of serif fonts include: Cambria and good ol’ Times New Roman.
Next we have the sans serif fonts. Literally translated from French, sans means without. The general characteristics of sans serifs is that they don’t have the embellishments that serif’s do.
Examples of sans serif fonts are: arial, geneva, and Helvetica.
Sticking with a serif or a sans serif is the most advisable for any web design project. Other fonts like decorative or scripts are a pretty big no-no for websites. If you must use them, use them very sparingly, like in a title.
When it comes to picking a font for your website, you might want to brainstorm a few ideas or keywords about what you want your font to say about your business. For instance, serif fonts are traditionally thought of as more traditional and serious, perfect for law offices etc.
When picking website text you want to have a few options to choose from but don’t go too crazy, pick no more than 3 fonts. If you’re really on the ball you will have a short and sweet font style guide. One font will be exclusively for headings or titles, one for sub-heads and one for body text.
When choosing a font see how it looks in a rather large size. Not everyone sees very well and the standard 14 point for body text may not be super readable for everyone, make sure that your font isn’t going to be incredibly ugly when it is an 18 point.
Go crazy! Mix serif and sans serif fonts. It may seem counter intuitive but they do actually complement one another.
Of course these are not the only things to think about when choosing a nifty font for your website, the typeface world is huge, and filled with potholes. A large part of a graphic design degree is learning about typography, the sparrow studios staff is always available if your head is wanting to explode just thinking about these things. Contact us if you want to chat about it.
