Website Design Secrets – The Best Website Fonts
Those learning about fonts, and especially to those who are pondering to utilize the fancy Google Code fonts, I’m glad that you’re about to get some very important education.
The Best Website Fonts are:
- Georgia
- New Times Roman
- Arial
- Verdana
- san serif
And if you must use another font, or even a Google Code font use it only for headlines and titles only. Usually those things appearing in you h1, h2, etc. tags.
You may think that is ridiculous, that you must use those fonts from 1999, but read on and I’ll teach you why.
Back to Basics
Whether or no you have the eye for design, we as humans are very visual people and we know what may appeal to us or what doesn’t. Sometimes we don’t know why something doesn’t appeal to us, all we know is that we just don’t like it, thus the same can be with fonts.
You see, we’ve learned to read from a font that is very similar to either Arial or New Times Roman. The biggest distinguishing feature between those two fonts is if we took the letter “g” does it have the open look or does it have the cursive closed loop. The Arial font is very square and basic and the New Times Roman font has curves and arches.
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Think back to Sesame Street, it may have been a while but when they were teaching you the alphabet they showed you both letters and they were in the Arial or New Times Roman font, and then the children’s books, and school textbooks.
You see it didn’t start there, the fonts were defined from the original source: the newspaper. Front the original printing press, New Times Roman resembles the font used by the newspapers, and back before the invention of even a light bulb, and the automated printing press, people learned to read from newspapers, that where more readily available and were considered useless the next day.
Speedy
And it all boils down to speed, just try it for your self. You read quicker when the font is familiar then a font that you don’t know visually, and your mind has to work a little harder to decipher the shape and pattern of the font. You have 18 years of being trained to read in a specific font. Therefore, when you go to a website with a fancy font, or even all caps, it is harder for your brain to read the content, and after a while you may become annoyed or develop a headache, and not even know why.
Stick With The Basics
Therefore, to all the designers out there that have choices for fonts, stick to the basics. Or your visitors and myself my just go somewhere else where it’s just a little bit easier to read.
