How to Select Fonts in Web Designing?

Most websites are made up of several design elements, including images, videos, and visual details such as shapes, patterns, and textures. However, the text makes up most of a website’s visual content. Accordingly, all professional web designers need to focus on fonts.

From headings to body content, words are crucial to a website. As such, fonts are crucial to web design. Bad fonts can reduce readability and web aesthetics, which impacts users’ experience. You need a web designer to ensure the fonts don’t negatively affect your web traffic.

If you want to select fonts for your web design, here’s what you should consider:

Figure Out the Branding

Your font needs to be consistent with your branding. Why? Well, fonts are a visual representation of your brand. If you ask a graphic designer to make your company logo, they will ensure the font matches your brand guidelines. The same goes for website fonts.

Is your brand serious and traditional? Your website font will be straightforward and clear-cut. Your web designer may rely on default fonts such as Times New Roman or Serif Sans.

Alternatively, if your branding is unconventional and fun, your font may be playful and unique. Your web designer may use cursive fonts such as Monarda and Raksana.

As such, you can’t decide your website font without figuring out your branding. If you don’t have brand guidelines, you need to create one. What is your target audience? What stylistic elements will appeal to them? What visual elements does your competition use?

By asking these questions, you can assess what your brand identity will be. The visual elements on your website will communicate your brand identity to your users.

Outline the Lengths of Your Website Text

Now, if you know your brand identity, you know the type of fonts you’re leaning towards. However, the text length is also a key consideration when deciding on fonts. You need a font that will ensure the text is easy to read.

For example, for headings and subheadings, your selected font can be more experimentative. You can use different script elements with varying patterns and complex details. This is because the text is larger, and most likely still readable with added design components.

However, larger bodies of texts need more traditional fonts such as Serif Sans or Libre Baskerville. These bodies of text have smaller fonts.

Whether they’re medium-sized bodies (consisting of a few paragraphs) or large-sized (full articles), your readers need simple and bold fonts that naturally guide them through the text.

Also, fonts appear differently on phones and computers. Professional web designers will always ensure that the text is easy to navigate on both mediums. Therefore, traditional fonts are better in this regard as they’re easily interchangeable between the two.

Look at Other Design Elements

Lastly, when finalizing a font, you must have a holistic view of all design elements of the website. For example, you could pick a thin, handwritten font, but find that it’s not as legible against the white website backdrop.

As such, contrasting is essential when selecting fonts. Your backdrop should always contrast the color of your text. Traditionally, websites use white backdrops against black fonts. However, in recent years, more web designers have used bolder backdrop colors to emphasize the font.

Contrasting can also occur within the font. You can choose contrasting font forms and sizes to highlight certain words over others.

If you’re a professional web designer, you must also look at spacing, which is a fundamental component of web design. However, spacing is further divided into kerning, tracking, and leading.

The first is the space between letters, the second is the space between words, and the last is the space between lines of text. Font impacts the size of spacing, so web designers must modify all three to ensure the words are easy to grasp.

Another important design element is alignment. You must experiment with text placement to ensure optimized readability. In many ways, your font won’t matter if your alignment is off. Your readers won’t engage with your content as much if the text flow is scattered.

Conclusion

In sum, selecting a website font is an important decision. You can’t just choose font at random. Many things can go wrong. Therefore, you need a web designer to help you through the process.

Web designers understand the nuances of design elements on a website. As such, they’ll provide valuable insight into your font selection.