This is will explain the Important Things to Know about Typography. Most people put a lot of thought into how their website looks. They want colors that mesh well and pop without overpowering the audience. They want a layout that’s user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing so that people are encouraged to surf around and spend time on the site. And they want graphics and icons that reflect the brand and stand out without being obnoxious.
But there’s one thing that many people forget to pay attention to: the font. After all, it’s just the way the words look, right? It’s the content that matters.
Wrong! While of course it’s vital to have engaging content, that won’t matter one bit if your audience can’t even read it. Here are five things to think about when choosing a font for your site.
Is it legible?
This seems obvious, but too often those of us used to thinking about the aesthetics of a page get caught up on how well a particular font meshes with the visual theme we’re going for. That’s all well and good, but remember that the most important thing is that the typography you choose is clear and readable. Often (but there are exceptions) this means sticking to the usual subjects – things like Times New Roman, Helvetica, Arial, Tahoma, Garamond, and similar styles.
Titles versus body
Titles can and should be big and bold (though not necessarily literally bold), and if you’re going to use a typography that’s more, shall we say, stylistic, titles are the place to do it. Just remember that the style in question needs to look good in large sizes, because you want titles big to draw attention.
In contrast, the main point of the body of your text is to convey information, so it just needs to be clean and simple. Oh, and just like title typography needs to look good big, body typography should work well in smaller sizes. The last thing to consider is how well the two fonts look next to each other on the page.
Three is a crowd
Generally speaking, you want two different kinds of fonts (one for the titles and one for the body) andonly two. If you start to add in additional kinds of typography, the page will come across as a disorganized jumble.
Size isn’t everything.
We mentioned before that titles should be bigger to stand out, and most of the time that’s true. However, increasing the size of titles isn’t the only way to call attention to them. You can also set them apart by where you place them, their weight, using tracking (adding or decreasing the space between individual letters in a word), and by making them a different color than the rest of the text. Using color in this way, in fact, can be a great way to complement the visual design of the page.
Break the rules
No, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore everything we’ve just said. Rather, it’s an invitation to take a look around the web at what all the other sites are doing and do something completely different. Don’t just make your title bigger, cover the entire homepage with it. Or make your titles small but striking, and use body text that’s larger.
The point is to think outside of what’s been done before. Anything is fair game so long as it serves the design and makes the site easy to read and navigate.
