To Font or Not to Font?

Apr, 5 2009

 

Web design is an industry that comes with a lot of questions. Does the client want an image on the home page? What color should the background be? Should it include a video, or would that eliminate too many users with slow Internet connections? If you are designing your website, you may not realize that the font you use on the site is actually just as important as the rest of these questions. While you may want to use a fancy, swirling font to add character to your site, doing so may make it difficult for some visitors to access your site.

 

Making a Use Friendly Website

Good web design is not just about making a beautiful website. It is about making a website that the user can easily access and navigate. For this reason, minimalist web design is essential. While flowery images and flowing fonts may look beautiful, they can be cumbersome to navigate, particularly for users with slow Internet connections and older computers. A minimalist website makes the information easy to access, avoiding the temptation to add so much to the site that it is too busy for readers to enjoy.

 

How Computers Recognize Fonts

Each computer comes loaded with a default set of fonts. Some users add fonts to this set, but every computer has a limited number of fonts it recognizes. If a website has one of these recognizable fonts, it shows up as it should on the user’s computer, and viola, the designer has created a site that has met its goal and has been read.

 

Unfortunately, every computer has a different set of fonts. If the website visitor views a site that has a font that his computer doesn't recognize, the computer will render the font differently, and this often is not the way the web designer intended it to look. Instead of a flowing, curly font, the site may have a blockish, straight font, which may throw off the entire design. Sometimes the newly rendered font interferes with other elements of the design and makes it impossible to read the site.

 

The Solution

While it would be nice to have a crystal ball to use to see into everyone else’s computer and choose a pretty, yet readable, font, there is no way to know what each individual visitor’s computer settings will be. There is, however, a solution to this problem. There are some fonts that have been labeled as “web safe.” Safe fonts are fonts that are included on almost every computer, at least every modern computer, in an attempt to make web design less of a guessing game.

 

Why are safe fonts so important? You have a website for a reason, and that is to provide information or market a product. If your visitor cannot read the font clearly, you have not accomplished your purpose. Remember, internet users have short attention spans. If reading the website is difficult, even if the font is readable, the user is not going to go through the work of reading it. Have in mind Internet users want access to information without a lot of work. They are used to pointing and clicking, not digging. If your site is not easy to use, they will click away, and you will have lost a chance to impact a visitor with your message.

 

So, a website that is not read is wasted, and even if the fancy font looks best with your web design, opt for a web safe font instead for main content. You can always add another design element to dress up the site, but if your visitors cannot read it, you lose.