Elements of a Successful Web Font

Austin Walker Austin Walker
April 26, 2018   |   3 min read time

When designing a webpage, you must put a large amount of time and thought into choosing your font. Your font must be able to represent your brand identity while loading in quickly, be easy-to-read, and convey a certain feeling to your audience.

There is no best way to be certain that the fonts you choose will be positively received by your audience and properly generated by various web browsers. The only way to be certain is to test your webpages yourself.

Use many different web browsers to test your site before you launch and make sure that the overall feel coincides with your main message by asking people what they think. Keep in mind, the people you work with cannot offer an unbiased opinion. Ask somebody else!

Language and writing

Loading Times

While loading times for individual characters of different fonts do vary negligibly, if you host a large array of different fonts, sizes, and colors; your new potential client or valued customer will be forced to wait.

Make your web content available in different languages and you could be looking at a load time that is in the dreaded 6-10 second load—loathe—time. With more and more web-based companies entering the market every day, your business needs to provide your customer with the instant gratification they seek when web browsing to make an impact.

Notice how Third Love’s website restrains its font usage to only those of a similar family, thus reducing the amount of time it takes their web pages to load. In addition to fonts, there are many other factors that can affect your website’s load times, including images, videos, ads, CTAs, hyperlinks, and server speed; just to name a few.

You can make your website satisfying to peruse by paying close mind to loading times.

Readability

Have you ever visited a webpage that feels busy, claustrophobic, and overwhelming? Hopefully, this has not been when browsing your own website. The readability of your pages directly correlates with the amount of success and business your website will generate: if it is jumbled and difficult for your audience to read, then they are likely to just click their back-button and consult a search engine for a new website; if your website is clean and concise when considering fonts and content, your returning and new customers will likely stay a while.

With more and more people perusing internet content on mobile devices, it is incredibly important to make sure that your website is also readable via mobile access.

To do this, you must make sure that the fonts you choose for your page are easy to read in both small and large sizes on both large and small screens. Consider the layout of Five Valley’s Custom Furniture site: the layout is clean, the fonts are easily readable via desktop or mobile device, and the feel is inviting overall.

Font Emotions

Much like certain colors evoke certain emotions within their viewers, the same can be said about the seemingly endless supply of fonts to choose from. Take for example:

Arial Black; with its bold-face and hard edges, this font, in particular, emphasizes feelings of power and masculinity.

Freestyle Script is far better suited for a website that seeks to produce feelings of whimsy.

Arial; (the #1 font used in web design in 2015) is a more neutral font that welcomes users to interpret the contents of your website as they see.

The fonts you choose will produce a certain feeling in your reader, whether they are fully aware of it or not. It is incredibly important to note that if the font’s emotion does not match the overall feel of your website, there will be a disconnect between you and your potential customers.

Take for example (some protein supplement OR the NRA) website; if they used fonts akin to Freestyle Script, the entire feeling the reader gets when visiting the website would be generally uncomfortable and bad for business.

Aesthetics: Putting It All Together

Throughout this post, we have discussed both the concrete and abstract functions fonts serve on a website. The compatibility and loading times of the fonts you choose on your webpage will either attract or deter customers based upon the accessibility of your page; whereas the readability and font emotions will either attract or deter readers based upon the feelings your website generates.

Readability

In order to rise above your competition, you must seamlessly connect all of these aspects to create a page that functions perfectly; not only mechanically, but also metaphysically.

In order to produce the best possible website for your business, you must pay close attention to how the fonts, the color schemes, the images, and the language you use function within the overall message of your business.

By taking all of these aspects of design into consideration, your website will undeniably generate more business for your company.


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