As there is much consideration to think about when creating the perfect web design, choosing fonts is usually overlooked.
Choosing a font can be tricky. With the various complexity of type, combined with the endless list of options to evaluate.
While there are no easy-to-follow rules on choosing a font, many tried-and-true principles exist. This you can quickly learn and apply to make an appropriate typeface choice.
It is important to note as we start, the choice of font you choose can have an impact on your web design look and feel.
In this article, I’ll walk you through all the things you need to know to choose fonts for your web design.
Brand Guideline
A brand style guide is an essential tool for businesses that gives clear guidelines on how to communicate a brand effectively.
How the elements that make up your brand communication are used are outlined in the brand guideline.
A brand guideline details the choice of font, the voice and the intended audience of a company among other elements to ensure consistency across all their communication channels.
So, your brand guideline is essential in communicating a consistent branding strategy.
When growing your brand while connecting multiple elements, it is essential to define your colours, your logo and, of course, your typography. They are a set of rules to help your team create a unified identity.
Here’s how to create a brand guide for your company.
Choose fonts that fit Your Brand Personality
Your font choice needs to represent your brand personality in order for your design to look spot-on.
Answer the question when defining your brand personality, are you a traditional type of business or are you minimalist and modern or fun? Would you describe your company as classic, retro, or funky?
Understanding your brand’s personality should guide you to choose the best font for your website with the right look and feel in place.
For instance, if you own a toy store with a lot of kids-associated accessories. You could mix an old-school, round-looking font for the headings with a classic sans-serif font for the body text. Using a nice fresh-looking font like Chewy for your headlines, then it’s a good idea to use a sans-serif like Open Sans, which is known for its readability, for your body text.
This will give you a balanced look that’s both relevant and works perfectly with your kid’s brand.
In contrast, if you are a law firm typography that communicates trust and professionalism is what would be recommended. A stylish yet classic and elegant serif font such as Frank Ruhl Libre or Playfair Display would be appropriate. It would illustrate to potential customers dependability and top-notch service.
Matching Brand Fonts
Brand guidelines will include typefaces and families, font sizes, and the hierarchy of the fonts your brand uses, so you can integrate them into your web design immediately.
However, if your brand uses custom typography, then the designer will need to find a similar-looking web font to use in your web design.
As typography is multifaceted not matching the perfect font might end up having a clean website.
That is why it is widely recommended to use Google Fonts to match your brand typography as closely as possible.
Nevertheless, if your brand is using an unknown font, tools like WhatTheFont can help identify the font being used on the website.
In any case, if you haven’t picked your brand fonts, here are some crucial things to think about when choosing a font for your design.
Be Consistent
In all your communication as a brand starting from your business card, to website design, there needs to be a glimpse into your brand and your company’s overall design.
Experimenting with new fonts each time when creating your web design, creates an inconsistent brand image.
In short, it is crucial to be consistent when it comes to colour, style and choice of fonts in all your brand communication, both in digital platforms and printed materials.
All these alignments you make with the brand style guide need to create a perception of a complete and coherent brand picture.
Type of Fonts Suitable for Web Design
Regardless of the type of font you choose to match your brand identity, keep in mind having web safe font that’s easy to use and suitable for a majority of browsers.
When searching for the perfect web-safe font, your best bet is to browse the Google Fonts library and in most cases, you’ll find what you’re after.
To break it down, using a web-safe font means that your visitors don’t have to have a particular font installed on their computer to see it correctly.
Google Fonts with over more than 8,000+ free-licensed fonts available to use, it’s the best resource to find web-safe fonts.
First, including these fonts in your font stacks mean, every visitor to your site is able to have a consistent experience from the choice of font. Since the fonts are installed on their devices or stacked in the web service.
So, with web safe font, all your web visitors will see exactly the same page with the same font.
In addition, this will ensure that your web design looks and feel stay uniform across all browsers and devices.
How to Combine Different Fonts in Web Design
The combination of fonts for your web design can be defined by three rules:
Consider Context
Where your design will appear should help you determine what fonts will work for your project.
The text should be easily readable at the size it is going to be displayed, and clarity is especially important for small types.
Notice how in the example below, the smallest text is in all caps, and the letters are spaced generously -both choices enhance legibility.
Choose complementary fonts
Many fonts have distinct moods or personalities – serious, casual, playful, and elegant.
You want to make sure the personality of your font choices matches the objective of your design.
For instance, a rounded, bubbly typeface may be appropriate for a child’s birthday party invitation, but not for your business newsletter.
When you’re creating a website, chances are you’re going to need more than one font.
Consider choosing not more than three appropriate fonts for your target group.
Establish a visual hierarchy
Just as in the traditional publishing formats like newspapers and magazines, website design publishing format is quite the same, they both apply a visual hierarchy to fonts.
The combination of fonts needs to dictate visually different textual elements like headlines, sub-headlines, body copy, and captions.
Qualities such as size, weight, and spacing (including leading – the space between lines, and kerning – the space between letters) all contribute to how the eye should navigate the web page and what text should attract attention first.
Conclusion
Picking the best font for your web design entirely depends on the objective of your project.
Have in mind your brand personality when thinking of choosing style and design. Depending on what you want to communicate as a brand, the choice of font is the perfect tool to do that.
For classy, serious or traditional – Choose an elegant serif font. When looking for modern and minimalist – Pick a clean sans-serif font.
Consider combing fonts that match your brand style to achieve to have a consistent look and feel.
In a nutshell, your choice of fonts says a lot about your business, so choose keenly.
