How you use fonts on a web site can help users
understand your content and show off your professional design
skills. You can also get into trouble if you go overboard.
I learned many years ago that what I thought
was a cool font for a project was actually a font used for
fashion magazines. My editor politely pointed this out to
me, but had she not, the page would have given a weird impression.
Needless to say, I was not writing for a fashion magazine,
it was a medical software company. On a web site, you have
to think about fonts in two ways. Those that are regular
text (those that can be selected using the mouse) and those
turned into graphics.
The three most popular selectable body text
fonts are Verdana, Geneva, and Times Roman. These are very
safe for use in your content areas. Arial is commonly used
in header areas. It is best to have no more than three different
fonts on your site. More than three and your text will look
disjointed and inconsistent. Your headers and subhead are
generally sans-serif fonts (serifs are those little swirls
on the edges of letters). Serif fonts (like Times Roman)
are, as mentioned above, best used for body text.
When designing the text on your web page,
you can tell the browser what fonts you would like it to
use (when using a cascading style sheet, the style sheet
file indicates what fonts you want to display). But remember
the fonts you want to use on a web page are limited to those
* resident * on the person's computer. The browser can only
work with the fonts it has available to it. So if you ask
for "Bank Gothic" and that font is not on 30%
of your target user's computers, then those computers will
have to make a font substitution (which may not be look
very professional). So stick with the most common fonts
to be safe. This is not the case for text that you write,
then turn into a graphic. In this case you can use whatever
font your heart desires, but again, be cautious. Just because
a font looks neato to you, doesn't mean it will get a similar
response from your audience.
Try to match the goals of your site to the
fonts you use. A day-care web site can use Comic Sans font
effectively whereas a real estate company would be better
off staying with conservative fonts like Helvetica or Arial.
It all depends on what type of information you plan to convey.
Fonts can be fun to work with but also overwhelming, since
there are so many to choose from!
