Fonts for Your Website: Is it Just a Matter of style?

The choice of font you use at your website can be affected
by so many different elements: personal taste, style, screen
resolution and size, operating system, monitor age,
background and - not last - readability and ease of use.

The most common font used for print ant the Web is
Times New Roman. This is the default font of many
applications including most of the Microsoft Office
Suites. That is not to say it's the most readable or
comfortable font; on the contrary, Arial, Courier and
Verdana are considered more readable.

A study conducted at Wichita State University in 2002
titled: A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which Size
and Type is Best? found these amazing results:

Times New Roman was deemed the least preferred font
in 10 or 12 point size.

Arial was most preferred in the 12 point size and Verdana
was the most preferred in the 10 point size.

Overall, Verdana was the most preferred font for readability
and ease of comprehension.

The fonts considered most legible are Arial, Courier and
Verdana.

As far as looks, Times New Roman and Georgia are preferred
over the others.

All the above appears to imply that for design choices, like
when a large font is used as a decoration, Times New Roman
or Georgia is the choice.

For general speed of reading and less strain on the eyes
it's Arial if using a small font.

Verdana was the choice for best compromise between
legibility and speed.

All the above should be included in the building plans for
your website since they can affect the looks of so many
items, such as: Headlines, header tags, choice of colors,
links, contrast and decoration.

You can compensate for many elements of styling by using
different fonts and sizes. For example, if you are super
imposing text upon a graphic perhaps it would be best to
make the font bigger to help the eye separate the font
from the image.

The same common sense approach can be used for the body
areas: use colors that will bring out the text and make it
easy for your visitors to read your website. Don't use dark
fonts on a dark background because they are very hard to
read.

Likewise, do your best to copy well established convention
by making the colors of your HTML links in standard colors
such as blue for unvisited, purple for visited and so on.

Overall, don't use more than 3 types of fonts on your
website and do your best to include the "Big Picture" in
your design. Show a few completed sketches to your friends
and family and ask their opinion. Revise and re-do as often
as needed.

As a time saving measure, make sure to use CSS (Cascading
Style Sheets) for your website design because it allows you
to change the font style of a complete website by just
changing the information in the style sheet. A real time
saver when you have a 100 page website.

Above all, your website should have its own theme and style.
It should have text that invites the visitor to explore more
and be easy to read and understand. The visual load on the
eyes should be as small as possible to prevent fatigue.
The general look should be one of integrated design with
user friendliness as its ultimate purpose.

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by Francisco Aloy

(C)2004 Francisco Aloy
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