May 11
Thoughts on fonts for webpages
2004 at 05.32 am posted by Veerle
Which is your favorite font? I was wondering this this morning while I passed by Design by Fire (by Andrei Herasimchuk). Andrei wrote an article about Trebuchet and the fact that he hates it. Sure it’s all a matter of personal taste but some of them are better suited for readability. Personally I like the font, I use it a lot in Word. I find it a nicer more trendy font then Arial and Verdana. Especially Arial is so basic and lacks any personality.
The fact that I’m using Trebuchet is because this way I’m sure that the receiver on PC will see it correctly. Course I’m talking pure design-wise here. As for good reading I guess Arial and Verdana are on top.
My personal font is Lucida Grande. It’s a very elegant font and it’ easy to read. It’s also the standard font now in Mac OS X. I use it for my blog and I see a lot of others using it too. Too bad you only see my blog in this font on a Mac. I’ve never used it so far on any other website designs, simply because I know that most visitors for the sites I design are Windows users. I wish we could use just the fonts we like for HTML text instead of just standard system fonts. This way we would have the freedom. Wouldn’t that be great! So this is a call out to Apple and Microsoft: “Please in future system releases, include some nice looking fonts!”.
In my text examples you’ll also see a serif font. I use serif fonts too (Times or Georgia) in some designs since they often suit better in a certain style then a non-serif one. I like it in retro webdesigns, like for instance in this site.
Or you can use a combination of both and use a serif font only for some accents like the titles, for instance on Asterisk*. I think as long as you avoid too much of combinations of all sorts of font and font-styles you are safe.
I guess the right choice between serif or sans depends on the style of the site. For minimalism a non-serif font is the right choice. Using a serif font in such a design will change to mood of the design completely.
5served
1
I’m with you on this one, Veerle.
I like Trebuchet and I’m using it as my font of choice for my dissertation.
As far as web design is concerned, I prefer Trebuchet for titles and logotypes - I think it looks very nice if used in big sizes and/or in bold - and Verdana (or maybe Georgia, if you want to convey a certain mood) for copy text.
2
I’m “guilty” of indulging in Trebuchet for a new corporate design at the moment; it was decided upon after finding Arial too bland, and Verdana too bulky.
Nice font comparison image by the way — makes your point very well — and with evidence like that, Andrei might have to consider backing down (on this issue at least ;-).
3
Michele, yes the font is nice if it’s used in a big size. It isn’t very suitable for tiny sizes, then Verdana or Arial is better, actually a pixel font is prefect then.
I guess it is a matter of personal taste. I just see no ‘real’ problem with this font.
4
Georgia! It looks so clean and professional when used correctly.
5
To get a similar look for Lucida Grande on PC, you can use Lucida Sans Unicode, it looks very similar.