Tips for Selecting a Font for a Website
In web design, the look and feel of any website depends upon some basic factors like images, colors, styles and more importantly fonts. Using the right font is important to maintain the look of your website and also to ensure better readability. For beginners, it can be quite difficult to select the right font for a website. The article provides some basic tips for selecting a font for a website that will help in making the right choice.
Tips for Selecting a Font
Selecting a font for the web is especially difficult. Although there are no specific rules for using a font, it must complement the design perfectly. Here are some tips to select a font for a website:
- Balance Style and Usability: Most beginners commit the mistake of choosing font that suit their own style and preferences while selecting a font for a website. However, this can be quite subjective and based on individual taste and preferences. Instead the emphasis must be on appropriateness. You need to choose between a font that is stylish as against one that is subdued but more useful and suitable for most designs.
- Identify all-weather fonts: Most web designers use two main types of fonts – serif and sans serif. Serif fonts have small and strokes and lines that stretch till the end of the letters. On the other hand, sans serifs are simple fonts with no lines/extensions to the letters present in the serif fonts. As a web designer, one of the most essential tips for selecting a font is to identify a set of fonts that can be suitable for a range of website designs and styles. Some of the best sans serif fonts that can complement various styles include Myriad, Gotham, DIN, Akzidenz Grotesk and Interstate. Some of the most popular serif fonts are Mercury, Electra and Perpetua. The other popular font family is Helvetica that can complement several web designs.
- Study Font Families: Like serif and sans serif discussed earlier, you must study the different fonts and families to get a better understanding of using them. If you are designing a website on ancient history, you may think of using fonts like Times New Roman or Baskerville. While designing a website on modern designer apparel, you can use fonts like Bodoni or Didot that will give a modern and sleek look.
- Don’t use too many: Usually, designers prefer to stick to a maximum of two fonts for a website. However, if you want to show more variation, you may use 3-4 fonts. However, using too many fonts at one time is not a good idea. Using too many font types can create a disconnect among the audience. Selecting one font throughout the website enhances the visual appeal and uniformity to the website.
- Choose the right font size: Apart from the font style, selecting the right font size for the web content is also important. Usually web designers prefer to use 12px for the content body. However, in case you have more content and want to enhance readability, you can even go in for 14px. The title need not be too big and can be just big enough to distinguish.
These are some of the basic tips that will help new web designers in selecting the right font for a website. This is a skill that you can develop only with experience and working on a range of websites.
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