Guide To Choosing The Best Website Fonts

What are the best fonts to use on a website or blog? It may seem like a minor choice, but it is not. Find out more in this article.

Choosing the right font for your website is a fundamental step to guaranteeing users the best possible experience in reading content. To ensure that the reader concentrates on what you write, it is important to pay attention to how you write it: the text, in fact, must be immediately understandable for the reader, whose eyes should not be tired from reading. Now let’s see which are the best fonts for websites.

Table of Contents

What Is A Font

Before going to identify the best fonts for websites, it is good to clarify the concept of fonts and characters. Often these two terms are used interchangeably, but there is a nuance between the two that differentiates them.

The “character” is a letter (such as the “c” character), a punctuation mark, or a symbol. It can be made up of several glyphs (“C”, “c”, ” c “, ” c “). The set of characters and glyphs designed with the same visual consistency and meaning is defined in the common language as “font,” a term that, in reality, more technically, would identify the means that allows applying a character.

The word “font” is the English transposition of the medieval French term” source, “which originally meant “spindle” (referring to Gutenberg’s movable type machine).

The Different Types Of Fonts

We assume that not all fonts are free: for some, as is the case, for example, for photographs or songs, it is necessary to purchase the license as they are copyrighted.

Difference Between Font Serif And Sans Serif

There are two macro-categories: serif (with grace) and sans serif (without grace).

Serif Typeface

The first category includes those characters that have particular signs at the beginning and at the end of the auctions, aimed at making the appearance more graceful and accompanying the eye in reading from one character to another in the text. Serif typefaces are widely used on printed paper, while they are less suitable for viewing on a computer screen as they exhibit a more evident pixel effect at low resolutions.

An example of a serif typeface is Times New Roman.

Sans Serif Typeface

Sans serif typefaces, without those particular signs mentioned above, are simpler and more schematic and, even at low resolutions, are more legible. An example is the Arial.

Decorative And Calligraphic Fonts

Among the various types of fonts, there are then decorative fonts (which have particular decorations for the characters and which are sometimes used on the web for titles, subtitles, or banners) and calligraphic fonts (which simulate handwriting and, therefore, are very elegant, albeit difficult to read).

Font And readability: How To Choose

To identify the degree of readability of a font, it is useful to use the so-called “Il1 test” (capital I, lowercase L, number one): by writing these three characters very similar to each other with the various fonts to be tested; it is possible to identify quickly and evident what allows them to be better distinguished (for example, using the Gill Sans MT font these three characters are practically indistinguishable from each other).

There are other factors to consider for the readability of a text on the web:

Horizontal Spacing

Horizontal spacing can be fixed or proportional: with fixed spacing, each character occupies the same space horizontally, while, with proportional spacing, the width of a character is variable. Generally speaking, proportional spacing is preferred for elegance, but in some cases, it is necessary to create columnar texts.

Vertical Spacing

Vertical spacing, otherwise called leading, is another element to be considered for the readability of a text on the web: a greater line spacing lets the text breathe more and makes it more pleasant to read.

The size of the fonts also affects the readability of a text on the web: the advice is always to find the right compromise between the needs of style and readability since a text with a smaller size can be very complicated to read, especially on smaller screens such as those of smartphones.

The Most Used Fonts On The Web

Among the most used fonts on the web are:

the Arial (also used by Google, Twitter, and Facebook);
Verdana (used by Facebook and Instagram, as well as eBay);
the Helvetica Neue (used by Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo).

There are three sans serif fonts, and this gives a precise indication of the choice of font for blogs and sites. Another aspect that this data highlight is that a site can also use multiple fonts within it. In this regard, however, the advice is not to exaggerate in terms of the variety of fonts.