So You Want a Different Font on Your Site?

Painting a Stranger’s Kitchen

Fonts on a website are like paint colors in your house. You wouldn’t go in and paint someone’s kitchen without discussing it with them. The analogy breaks down a bit since the “house” we are talking about is built to be a public place. A decorator might give their professional opinion, but the home owner can disagree. Decisions like these must be approached with tact and patience.

The web designer wears several hats and one is, without question, that of a teacher. Educating your client is a necessary step in delivering a product that not only makes the client happy, but is useful to the widest audience online.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?!

Fonts on a web page are not like on a printed page. For a font to be printed on a page, that font needs to be stored on and accessed by the computer that printed the page. In contrast, fonts on a website need to be stored on and accessed by every computer reading the page. Therein lies the problem. The reason you only see certain fonts used on websites is because there is only a small set of fonts that every computer has in common. There are three operating systems that each have different needs because they use different collections of fonts natively - Microsoft Windows, Apple’s OS X (ten), and Linux. While Windows represents the greatest number of users, the number of Apple and Linux computers are quickly growing. To really do a great job reaching the widest possible audience, you need to design your website to work with all three and, ideally, look identical no matter who is browsing the site.

Three Fonts Common to Man

There are three main font choices that are safe to use in any circumstance:

• Arial / Helvetica
• Times New Roman / Times
• Courier New / Courier.

The reason there are two names for each is because fonts have copyrights and fees involved in using them. To avoid paying the fees, fonts are sometimes created from scratch but designed to closely resemble another font.

Other options that usually work cross-platform are:

• Palatino
• Garamond
• Bookman
• Avant Garde

Fonts that work on Windows and Apple’s OS X but not Linux are:

• Verdana
• Georgia
• Comic Sans MS
• Trebuchet MS
• Arial Black
• Impact

Resources and Examples

There is much to learn about fonts and typography. Here are a few links that will give examples and some extra reading if you want to know more.

Web Safe Fonts

Font Examples

Even More Font Examples