How to choose the best fonts for your website as well as branding
The font on your site speaks volumes about your business's personality and the values. Follow these seven tips to pick the best web font.
The fonts you choose to use may seem nothing but a minor thing when it comes to designing your website.
These are the windows on the building, don't you think?
Not quite.
Fonts play a crucial role of your branding and make big impacts on the perception of your business.
Today, we bring you seven essential tips for finding appropriate fonts to use on your site, from choosing the top fonts and the best places you can download the fonts.
It is able to change the entire world.
However, we must first discuss why a font of any other name isn't just as delicious.
The importance of fonts for websites?
There's a lot riding on the fonts on your site since they aid in communicating your business' personality, message and values.
In a visual way Your website's font communicates an idea to your visitors in a way that they do not have to read the site's copy.
For instance, Mailchimp , which rebranded its site with font Cooper Light.
What made them choose Cooper Light?
Mailchimp believes that this font can be "dressed-up and casual, or more formal and accessible". It also conveys trustworthiness, sincerity, and optimism. These are characteristics that are in line with the values of their company.
The right fonts also serve a functional purpose. They can help people be able to comprehend your message on a variety of devices and platforms.
Airbnb as an example opted for a font called Cereal since it is compatible with a wide range of offline and online platforms. Cereal is a font that presents Airbnb as accessible and user-friendly.
In terms of accessibility, it's important to pick a font that's usable to all your audience members in particular if your company has a variety of languages.
If you choose an appropriate font that can be read by your customers' various languages, users who utilize an automatic translator can still read your website with ease.
For an example, we can use the text " The quick brown the fox ."
In English, the text is perfectly readable in Merriweather font.
But, when translated into Czech, it's much less readable and aesthetically-pleasing.
If a large part of your audience is using your website to translate it into a different language, make sure the font you use is accessible across all languages.
Beyond readability, many studies reveal that fonts can influence consumers opinions about a brand and its products universally.
For instance, font characteristics (such as naturalness harmony and weightaffect your customers' general impression of your brand.
These factors also impact your customers' purchasing intention.
The study also discovered that when shoppers look for an enjoyable vacation, having a simple font increases their willingness to spend money on the trip.
On the contrary, though, when shoppers search to find a tour that is more exciting and a font that's difficult to read, it makes them more likely to spend money on a tour.
Alongside the above effects, fonts also affect the experience of your customers beyond the point of purchase, and play into product perceptions and the overall experience for customers.
In one case, curvilinearity -- or fonts with curved lines affected diners' taste and expectations as well as their experiences.
What's the moral here?
Website fonts influence how your users perceive your brand's image, products, and experiences, and they also impact your site's accessibility as well as ease of use.
However, choosing the right font to send the right message is only an aspect of the process.
Familiarize yourself with the four most effective practices we recommend, and you'll be a lot more likely to find the right font for your needs.
Four tips to choose the most appropriate fonts for your website
Tip #1: Make sure you use accessible fonts
The ideal fonts for a website are ones which are easy to read.
If not, visitors to your site might leave your website because it's difficult to read. This, of course, means less time spent absorbing your marketing messages and exploring the offerings of your website.
So, readability should be the first thing you consider when selecting the font for your website. It will ensure that everything -- from your blog's content to call-to action (CTA) buttons and headers -- much more digestible.
Although there's no universal font for websites that will work most effectively for every company, Verdana and Georgia are good choices for displaying long website texts.
This is also backed by this study in which Verdana proved to be excellent for reading text on screens.
Readability is particularly important in the display of testimonials on your site. Actually, difficult-to-read fonts are a negative influence on positive reviews and shoppers believe the credibility of a reviewer in the event that their reviews are easy to read.
However, even though the importance of readability is high but it also comes with the caveat that fonts that are easy to read aren't always as appealing.
In fact, studies have found that when writing in difficult to read fonts, it's better remembered as opposed to writing using a font that is easy to read.
The research warns against going too far, though, as well as employing fonts that make reading difficult in general for those who read.
It begs the question -- how should you balance between easy-to-ready and hard-to-read fonts on your website?
Simply put, follow this two-part rule of thumb:
Wild Side Design For instance, it uses multiple fonts that focus attention of users to various areas of the page.
While its main content is written in a simple font however, its CTAs or captions as well as headlines use more elaborate fonts.
For another example, look to mad Hippie , a skincare business. It uses a font that is handwritten in order to highlight subheadings and short descriptions about the products it sells.
No matter what mix you choose in fonts, here's what you need to know:
The fonts that are simple to read are typically ideal for websites with text, especially long copy. The fonts with the most difficulty to read might be ideal for important information in shorter stints -- that you would like people to be able to recall.
Fonts and copy lengths aren't the only things to experiment with, though. Also, consider the size of your website this leads us to the next tip.
Tip #2: Make sure your font size big (enough)
There isn't a universal standard website font size however, you'll need to design it in a way that is sufficient for customers to read on any device.
One study recommended that text-heavy websites use the font of size 18 or higher.
The same study found that readability, and correct responses to comprehension tests, are higher when the font size.
Additionally, larger font sizes can help those with visual or reading impairments.
Additionally, for younger and older people, larger font sizes can lead to greater productivity precision, accuracy, and the distance of viewing, as well as a reduced perception of the difficulty of tasks.
If this isn't enough to get you to go with a bigger font size on your site, here's one more consideration for you.
Font size can affect website comprehension and readability for individuals with dyslexia, too. This experiment recommends using an 18-point font to design a website with people with dyslexia in mind.
To summarize:
The two points we have provided so are focused on usability, our third tip concentrates on the visual appeal of fonts.
Tip #3: Don't use excessive sizes of fonts, fonts, or color schemes.
Utilizing a variety of types of fonts, sizes of fonts and colors for your site can draw attention to various aspects of your website for instance, CTAs testimonials, CTAs, and other crucial text.
That being said it is important to limit the numerous fonts and colors you employ, to provide a consistent and visually appealing user experience.
If you don't have a website, it could appear too complicated or difficult to comprehend. You may also miss your mark when it comes to communicating your message since your site is too overloaded with variation.
If you want to see one example of a brand which does an excellent job with their font color choices and their messaging, check out Lowe's that uses black, blue, white and gray text, as well as numerous fonts on their site.
This aligns with the colors of the company as well as gender-neutral DIY home improvements positioning.
Workationing also balances the different fonts on their website. It employs black text on article titles and longer copy with white text, as well as black for buttons, headlines, and shorter text.
Though you're welcome to experiment with colors beyond black and white It is generally recommended to limit yourself to two or three colors.
This is due to the fact that shades other than white or black can be difficult to read on a website. So, save non-black and white colors for accent colors in order to draw attention to something you want to highlight on your page.
Take "The Abundant Artist" to give an example. The majority of their text includes black text, they use orange in headlines as well as category headings for articles.
If you're trying to choose the right combination for your website take a look at this article to fonts that go together . Also, if you're using Google fonts on your site do not miss these 21 Google Font combinations .
Basically:
It's fine to spice up your website with various fonts, sizes, or colors. Just make sure each font works well with each other, and offers a seamless and clean browsing experience for visitors.
Limit your zing at a minimum, since you'll need to maintain the same design across your entire website.
Tips #4: Ensure that you maintain your font usage in line with your font usage
Our last tip for this morning is to make use of consistent fonts across your website.
Why?
In addition to enhancing your branding power, consistent the use of fonts on your site provides users with a better user experience, and also makes browsing your website more pleasurable.
Particularly using the same fonts within the same format (such for headlines or body content) helps visitors find information more easily. In the end, 56% of customers want to locate what they require in 3 clicks or less, so any effort you make to make navigation easier is useful.
Plus, when you present a unified appearance on your website, you come off as credible and reliable.
This is a big deal given that 48percent consumers believe that the website of a company is one of the most reliable sources of data.
The process of gaining trust from your site's visitors must be done quickly as well. These days, people judge a website's credibility within 3.42 seconds depending on its design attractiveness.
Furthermore, the consistency between an image of the brand and their website can lead to the development of a positive attitude towards the brand, and.
In order to help you enjoy all these benefits For you to get the most out of these benefits, here are two examples of brands that use the same fonts.
Amazon uses the Ember font. Amazon Ember on its home page.
We're not going to blow our own our own horn, but we use similar fonts for headings and text throughout web pages too.
The main takeaway is to use the same fonts for the similar elements on your site, to make it easy for your visitors to navigate through.
Once you've mastered the best practice for fonts We'll look at how you can make use of them to select the perfect font for your site.
Find the right font for your website
#1. Determine what message you would like your font to convey
While readability should be the first consideration when selecting a font, the message you want it to send is a close second.
This restaurant opted for a font that tied in with their brand image of haute culinary, like.
Nature is an academic journal. selected a font called Harding since they needed a font that better represents mathematical symbols and formulae.
They also chose a new font with the appearance of "calm intelligent, rational" to align with their branding.
Though fonts are just placeholders for spoken word but they are capable of sending surprising different signals.
Take a look at Times News Roman, a widely used font. Times New Roman was perceived as more funny and angry than Arial in the study of participants who used satirical writings in the Times font.
In a separate study, the participants in a separate study were presented with email messages written in different types of fonts.
Participants who saw an email written in Gigi (which is shown below) found it more rebellious and youthful than the other fonts studied. The participants also considered Gigi to be less sturdy as well as practical.
The participants also viewed the person who wrote the email as in the Gigi email to be less trustworthy, professional and more mature.
These findings suggest that fonts are able to communicate more about your company and personality than the literal terms they portray.
To make sure your viewers are interpreting your message correctly, test your fonts before a site-wide deployment.
2. Test your fonts with your audience
The font you choose to use should not just be simple to read however, it must also be enjoyable to look at.
The saying goes, time flies while you're enjoying yourself, and the same goes for the time spent on your website.
Actually, the participants in experiments underestimated how long they spent reading text by 3 hours and 18 seconds in the average when they read a text that had good typography.
Contrary to the people who have read texts with a poor font and underestimated their reading time by 24 seconds in the average.
This research suggests that a quality font will help keep your readers interested in the text on your website, therefore you should choose the best font.
Some of your findings may alter your beliefs, but that's a good thing -- your research will help you find ways to make your site better for customers rather than confirm your ideas.
As an example, you might think that using a simpler font could boost conversions for your product and sales pages. However, a study has discovered that using an smoother font wasn't effective for increasing an ecommerce site's conversion rate.
The lesson here is to experiment with fonts in the people who visit your site before applying the same fonts to your website in general. Customers' interpretations of those fonts, and how they respond to them -might surprise you.
If your results are not conclusive or if you do not have enough people to survey, you can opt for our final suggestion.
#3: If you are unsure, opt for a common font
In the meantime, until you can determine the most appropriate fonts to represent your company, stay to the top fonts for websites like Georgia or Verdana.
Like we said earlier, multiple studies have shown Verdana to be one of the most effective fonts to use for websites body text.
In one study, subjects in a study expressed a preference to read Verdana for reading text in a computer's screen. The participants also read faster and showed fewer regressions (backward movement) while reading text using Verdana.
Another study revealed that the participants prefer a 12 point dot-matrix Arial font. A different study also suggested that people are able to comprehend more information when reading a sans serif font.
Now, you may be worried your customers could confuse the business with another one if you use a font that is widely used and it's certainly not an unreasonable concern.
Some companies have been criticized for using the same fonts or similar ones for their logos -take a look at how similar the fonts utilized for Google, Airbnb, Spotify as well as Pinterest are.
But, as entrepreneur Thierry Brunfaut notes, using similar fonts as the fonts used by other businesses isn't always a bad thing.
Thierry claimed that:
"The number of images that consumers are bombarded with every day is tremendous -- in the street as well as on a laptop or on a mobile.
A visual chaos that can be difficult to get into. Most of everything, clarity, are now the main words used by all brands.
These bold and neutral logos convey to the consumer the same message: Our brand and our products are straightforward, easy and easy to understand. And extremely readable."
Basically:
Do not be afraid of commonly used fonts -- they can often assist visitors to use your website or send a stronger message to visitors more effectively than an original (untested) font could.
If you're using a familiar or totally new fonts, take a look at the below font foundries for adding new fonts to your site.
Where can you locate the top fonts for your website
When it comes to locating fonts to use for your site, there are two choices. First, you can use what's built into your website design software of choice.
Another option is to utilize a font foundry or website on which fonts can be downloaded and/or for sale. This, naturally, opens you for more choices.
The top online font foundries include:
#1. Google Fonts
Google Fonts is one of the most popular font sites and, in my opinion, the best website for free fonts. Designers have access to hundreds of open source fonts that can be used in more than 135 different languages.
Each of the fonts on Google Fonts is free to use and is able to be utilized for commercial purposes .
#2. Fonts.com
Similar to Google Fonts, Fonts.com offers thousands of fonts for you to select front -- over 150,000 to be precise.
But, it is necessary to buy each font before making use of it.
#3. Fontspring
Fontspring is a font foundry that also offers thousands of paid fonts.
What separates Fontspring apart from other foundries is the fact that they have a badge for fonts that do not impose any unusual rules or restrictions on the users.
The risk of accidentally breaching your contract by using a font that purchased from their website.
#4. What Font
While it's not a font store for sale, it helps to find a font another website which you'd like to utilize for your own.
#5. Type Detail
If you've discovered the font that you love however you're not sure of how it will look in different weights and sizes visit Type Detail.
Type Information provides (naturally) information about a variety of famous fonts. For instance, this font profile called Neue Swift .
Among other things, Type Detail shows how the font looks in different sizes and weights, what distinguishes the font from others as well as similar fonts.
Now that you know where you can find the perfect font, find out how you can easily modify the fonts you display on your shopfront.
How to change fonts on your storefront
You can change your website fonts in a glance when you have your own storefront on .
To begin, navigate to the Editor and select the page you want to modify. Select your headings and body type style from the "Fonts" dropdown menu.
Simply click the downward-facing arrow on each box of fonts, then select the font that you like.
You're done! Now you've added a new font to your online storefront.
Pick the best typeface for your site with just a couple of easy steps
Fonts are more than just a way to represent words. They also influence how others perceive your business.
It is obvious that choosing a typeface for your business must be a priority along with choosing the appropriate logo, brand colors, and website layout.
When you use fonts from websites You should follow these guidelines:
Choose a font that is simple to read.
Create a font that is large enough to allow most readers (size 18 font or bigger)
Avoid using too many fonts sizes, colors or styles
Keep your font usage consistent
Select a font which conveys an appropriate message regarding your brand
Test your font with the people you are targeting
Use a common font if you can't yet decide which fonts you'd like to choose.
Like the right logo and brand colors, your website fonts can make the difference between a negative and a positive impression for the visitors to your site. Let's make sure you give them a positive impression.