Since the early inception of the web, the typography fonts used online and how they are used have changed tremendously. Wonder why a web site from the 90’s looks like…well, it was made in the 90’s? Often it’s the typography selections in the site. Early web fonts that were overused or ineffective often give a website design a dated look. When a particular typeface becomes popular for a short period and everyone starts using it then it dies out, it’s often easy to spot when the site was made.
The evolution of typography fonts for online readership is a part of the crucial evolution of the web. Sites quickly went from just throwing up a 4 page style brochure’s worth of information to having sites that hosted tens of thousands of pages of content that needed to be organized and readable. Web designers and online content producers quickly learned that online content was often scanned more than read word by word and required multimedia elements to link visuals to written ideas to make online reading easier to digest.
Early common web fonts for “web 2.0” informational sites such as Times New Roman, Courier New and Comic Sans often were accompanied by hideous color schemes and did not set the right mood for their content. Like print, web designers soon learned that not just any font will do: their clients needed their content to command authority and match their professional tone.
Today’s web designs has endless font choices for logos, web graphics and a much more open arena for site copy development with new advancements in CSS styling of pages. Early web clutter has been replaced with cleaner and easier to read fonts and adjustable text for mobile and tablet devices as a part of responsive design. In other words, web text has not only become more stylish, but also smarter and able to detect what someone is using to read it and automatically adjust.
The movement within web design of haphazardly throwing up sites for clients just to “be on the web” in the early years of the internet often did not make businesses extremely successful as they had hoped. It soon became apparent that excellent design and content had to accompany functional code in professional website design.
There is an unfortunate movement within modern web design that prioritizes style over and sometimes at the expense of practicality and functionality. As long as the design is trendy and modern, people will come and the site will succeed, proponents say. But design itself is effective visual and written communication – so when much needed informational content and reading accessibility is nixed in order to use the cool new font all the other web designers are using, it often hurts more than it helps. Not to mention that in 2 months, your site won’t look so fresh because the font will have become beaten to death throughout the web by designers eager to follow the trend.
The best design and web type choices align with website business goals, the type of information being presented and personality of the brand. Fonts themselves have strong personalities, so it’s important that typography choices match the personality of the client and industry in a professional way – not just follow cool new type trends. Experienced designers are specialists at matching the look and feel of different typefaces to brands, regardless of the trends on other sites.
Another negative movement which UX designers are trying to push back against is choosing “fancy” fonts that are not widely compatible (when used as rich text) across browsers and operating systems. An important consideration in modern web design and responsive design is that your font needs to be readable on different sized screens, scalable for devices including mobile, tablets and widely accessible across PC, Mac and Linux systems.
There are many series of high quality fonts that are donation ware or pay-what-you-what, such as Lost Type. It just takes a little digging!
If you are doing a demanding branding project and have a very specific need, paid fonts might be a better option to get a more unique, higher end look.
For responsive and email design: Change heading sizes, font size and the amount of content for mobile can be a wonderful technique to making your email blasts and responsive pages more effective. Typically, it’s much harder to read small text on smart phone devices. A new trend in responsive email design is to make text slightly bigger and use larger touch targets for links.
