Choice of Fonts in Web Design

Contributed by Cyberworm

Fonts in Web Design

The choice of fonts play a crucial role in the design of web pages, where text comprises a major part of the content. Let me first start with a formal definition of a typeface. Typeface refers to the particular design or "look" of a family of type, such as Times or Helvetica. Within each family, numerous variations such as italic bold, semi-bold, extra-bold or condensed - is referred to as a font. A font refers to a complete character set, including upper case, lower case alphabets, numbers, punctuation and symbols depicting a single variation of a single typeface.

Influence of fonts in web design

There is wide variety of fonts with differences between any two specific types. Some differences may be subtle and some may be obvious. The choice of fonts must be based on the theme of the web page to be designed. Take for example two diverse applications such as creating a technical forum for articles to be presented by scientists and a web-based e-mail portal. The choice of font in each case will be different, defining the mood of the web page. Ultimately its effect will speak volumes on legibility of the text content in a web page design.

Fixed and floating width fonts in web design

Every character in the font will have a fixed width in fixed width fonts. However, different characters having different widths are termed as floating width fonts. On starting a word processor try typing a series of "l" and in the next line a series of "w", it would be noted that they are of variable widths. Now set the font to "Courier New", repeating the same steps as above it would be noted that they are of fixed width.

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