Choice of Fonts in Web Design

1.  Fonts in Web Design

The choice of fonts plays a crucial role in the design of web pages, where text comprises a major part of the content. Let me first start with a formal definition of a typeface. Typeface refers to the particular design or “look” of a family of types, such as Times New Roman or Helvetica. Within each family, numerous variations such as italic bold, semi-bold, extra-bold or condensed – is referred to as a font. A font refers to a complete character set, including upper case, lower case alphabets, numbers, punctuation and symbols depicting a single variation of a single typeface.

Influence of fonts in web design

There is a wide variety of fonts with differences between any two specific types. Some differences may be subtle and some may be obvious. The choice of fonts must be based on the theme of the web page to be designed. Take for example two diverse applications such as creating a technical forum for articles to be presented by scientists and a web-based email portal. The choice of font in each case will be different, defining the mood of the web page. Ultimately its effect will speak volumes on the legibility of the text content in a web page design.

2. Fixed and floating width fonts in web design

Every character in the font will have a fixed width in fixed-width fonts. However, different characters having different widths are termed as floating width fonts. On starting a word processor try typing a series of “l” and in the next line a series of “w”, it would be noted that they are of variable widths. Now set the font to “Courier New”, repeating the same steps as above it would be noted that they are of fixed width.

When designing a web page with a table to give detailed information regarding the statistics of a company, “Courier New” font can be used so that the data in the table is neatly aligned and arranged. On the other hand, a tourism web portal that gives a tourist experience of a particular exotic place, the choice lies in variable-width fonts for the ease of reading and legibility.

3. Serif and sans serif fonts

Type the alphabet “h” in “Times New Roman” and magnify it to a large size, three small cross strokes could be seen at the ends. Fonts that provide such strokes are called serif fonts and ones without it are called sans-serif fonts. To name a few “Arial”, “Helvetica” are some of the sans serif fonts. Keeping both the arms of the balance equal, serif fonts are easier for reading text content in a web page

As they make the individual character set more distinctive and easier to recognize, it becomes the sought after font for web designing. One may still prefer sans serif font to the serif based on the environment to be created in the web content. A commonly followed font choice for a web designer is serif font for the body text and sans serif font for the heading in the page.

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