Fonts and Font Families

Before you get concerned about imagery and colour for your site, stop and think about fonts.

The content on your site is the main reason people are visiting. Shouldn't all your effort compiling research and writing page after page (then chopping them down because their too wordy) look as though you spent the same amount of time working on how they look so that visitors will actually want to read them?

A page that doesn't look easy to read isn't.

Font:

A font is a complete set of characters in a particular style and typically consists of a full letter set, number set and all other special characters you get by pressing the shift, control or option keys. Examples of fonts include "Arial", "Tahoma" etc.

Tahoma Regular
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
1234567890  !@#$%^&*()?

Font Family:

A font family is a complete set of styles within a font. An example of a font family is:

Tahoma Regular, Tahoma Bold, Tahoma Italics, Tahoma Bold Italics  etc…

When using fonts it's easy to get carried away with using 4, 5 sometimes 6 different fonts - you want to emphasize something so you use a different font, colour, size etc. to make it stand out. There's nothing wrong with standing out, however the rule of thumb with any design is to keep your font selection to a maximum of 3.

With font families it's easy to add variety to your body copy and headings without having to introduce a new font all together. By sticking to 2-3 fonts your site will automatically look more professional and easy to read.