10 Best Fonts for Websites: How to Choose the Best Web Font?

Often, we like a font because it’s readable, not just because it looks nice – try to pick a font that not only represents your brand values, but is also enjoyable to read. Using this infographic guide, it’s not hard to pick out the most suitable font design for how you want people to think of your brand. Once you’ve answered these main questions you’ll have an understanding of your brand’s personality and the look and feel you should be aiming for with your web design. Based on that identity, you can now pick the right fonts for your brand. However, if your brand uses custom typography, your designer will try to find a similar looking web font to use in your web design.

• Nevertheless, we advise using script fonts in headings and titles.
• Since most people are very familiar with these classic font designs, they instantly give off the impressions of heritage, reliability, and trust.
• Picking a font design for your main content is very different from choosing a font for your title, headline, or logo.
• Leading, tracking, line lengths, styling and weighting allow for further customisation and optimisation.

This concept is critical when considering font choices, as the legibility and familiarity of a font directly contribute to its cognitive fluency. Research has shown that fluent fonts, which our brains can parse quickly and easily, lead to more positive assessments of information. On the other hand, disfluent fonts that are difficult to decipher may frustrate users.

Don’t Underestimate White Space

Web fonts are fonts that are hosted on a server and downloaded by the user’s browser when they visit a website. Web fonts can be used to create a more unique and visually appealing website, but they can also slow down the loading speed of a website. Larger files and more intricate web design elements affect the speed and performance of your site. If you’re using third-party fonts from Google, for example, you can assume that these fonts will affect loading speed more than web-safe fonts.

In contrast, less legible fonts force users to expend cognitive resources on the reading process, diverting their attention from the information. Inter was specifically designed for screens and user interfaces. The main difference between them is that Exo 2 isn’t as stretched out and has softer edges, which improves the readability of the font. Although Exo 2 does have a futuristic edge to it, it’s still a clean font that would do well on a variety of websites trying to make a powerful statement. Accent fonts are typically used for specific website elements, such as the navigation menu or call to action button.

Best Fonts for Websites – The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Font

Specific font styles can convey different messages to people, such as trust, stability, strength, elegance and sophistication, and creativity. Or let’s say you are a law firm or a high-end cosmetics brand and want your typography to communicate trust and professionalism with a touch of class. If you want to learn more, Venngage wrote a nice article on font psychology to help you make the right choice.

Neither would they for your brand’s contact info nor the copy in your footer navigation. Casual and easy to read, Dejavu Sans shines with lighthearted copy. It also can make technical content more accessible, so it could be good if you’re a consumer-facing finance brand.

Dancing Script

Essentially, what modern fonts end up being are geometric styles with a slightly futuristic edge. They’re easy to read, but there’s a certain amount of excitement that comes with them as well. Another thing to look for is whether the font family includes number symbols that are related to what you’ll use them for (e.g. punctuation, currency, calculations, etc.). And similar to choosing regular fonts, you’ll want to ensure that none of the numbers too closely resemble one another, like the “1” and “7” figures.

The magic number of a perfect line-height is 150% of the font size you are using. It might be something you want to use on your kid’s birthday party invitation, but tacky and funky fonts have no place on any websites that want to be taken seriously. When choosing good website fonts, one of the most important considerations to take into account is accessibility. Before you commit to a font, see how it looks in all its different forms, sizes, and weights (the weight of a font determines how thick or thin the lines are). Here is a good resource to browse more about stylized font design. If you want to make a statement or appear robust, this is the type of font you should use.

The Right Font Can Create a Better User Experience

If your visitors feel comfortable reading your site content, they might stay longer than planned – especially new visitors. A type family should appear consistent, even harmonious across different scripts—which is no small feat. Designers matching two or more scripts for a font must balance separate histories and writing traditions.

Some well-known cursive fonts include Berkshire Swash, Pacifico, Molle, and Dancing Script. Decorative fonts work best as highlights and accents, e.g. headlines, highlighted quotes or article titles. They’re the cherry on top of the cake, so use sparingly and for dramatic effect. They add personality, humor and creativity, just don’t overdo it. Think of it like adding salt to your cooking and avoid overwhelming your audience’s palate. This means that they won’t work for long blocks of text or image captions.

How do you weigh a font’s functionality versus its design features?

In this case developers can use software to convert the font into a “web safe font”. But sometimes even that is not a guarantee that it will look good on screen, especially if you want your choosing fonts for website typography to look very crisp. That’s why designers often face the challenge of finding similar (almost identical) web safe fonts that are free and render well in all web browsers.

When choosing a font, you want something that conveys a specific brand identity. You can rely on brand guidelines to help you select suitable options. For example, Jitter uses the Inter sans-serif font for their starting pages. The brand applies this simple yet vivid font to outline the main value of its software, namely the easy approach to motion design. You can use brand guidelines and standard font classification when choosing fonts for a website design. Perhaps the most unusual out of this bunch of web safe fonts with serifs, Garamond is a favorite for designers.

Rely on the basic font classification

Over the past decade, however, this display font family has been expanded to include nine weights, ranging from thin to black. In addition, it comes with old-style features, similar to Calendas Plus. It also has an alternate style that turns this neo-grotesque font into a geometric sans serif. When choosing web fonts, you often have to weigh several considerations together. While the length of your text helps determine which font you select, the size at which you’re setting type is another important factor. At relatively small sizes, up to 16pt, try sans serif options like Roboto, Montserrat and Raleway.