What are the best fonts to use if you are building a new site? Are fancy, curly, eye catching fonts the finest, or the plain and boring standard fonts?
Usually when I am creating a web site after the client has looked at some revisions, the topic of conversation drifts to the fonts that should be used on the web site. This is the time that the fun really starts to begin! Usually the client has been browsing about Word on their computer and playing with several fonts there. So the question is put, “Could we have ultra curly school boy graffiti font for all of the headings and…”.
Stop right there! Go no further. The difficulty is that whilst this font might look stunning on your site, what will it look like when your customers visit your web site? And here is the difficulty and it is preceded with a technical explanation.
When you open a web site the style sheets dictate what fonts, or font families, should be used within the various areas of the webpage that you are opening. But all that this code does is to refer the browser to the collection of font that you already have installed on your computer. So if you have installed particularly curly school boy graffiti on your machine then you will be able to see that font when you open the page. But, if this particularly fancy font is not installed on your computer, then the default will be used.
So to be safe, when planning what fonts to use on the various elements of the page it is safest to stick to just those fonts that are installed on the majority of machines and will appear roughly the same. Here we are looking at not only the different versions of Windows machines, but also Macs.
This means that the selection of fonts that are compatible with the majority of users is very limited. There are ample of sites that collection most of them and allow you to see what they will appear as, but the choice is very limited.
Which is why we then get to a selection of standard fonts that we see in use on websites time and time again. Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana, Garamond and so on.
Sadly, this collection does mean that the fonts we get to play with are not that exciting, but if you want to be displaying the page as text, then that is the rule that we have to abide by. But, there are alternatives. For example, if you are designing banners, logos and other elements of the page then these might be created as images on your computer and this gives you the freedom to experience any font that you could find on the internet. The downside - well images are not accessible to search engines and accessible readers, so the content of the page cannot really depend on such techniques.
You could use graphics for headers and supply an alt attribute for search engines and those unable to read the graphics if you are desperate to use a fancy font. But, aside from this cheat, the best fonts to use when you are creating a web site are those boring and regularly used fonts listed above.
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