Fonts on the Internet

When using fonts as a tool of branding on the interent there are some things you need to know. Websites use what's called "system text" most of the time, like the text you're reading right now (text that you can select with your cursor). Websites use fonts that are on YOUR machine (the end user), not on the web server that is hosting the site. THUS, it is a rule of thumb for websites to stick to a smaller group of fonts known to be widely available, pre-installed on windows and macintosh machines.

Commoly used fonts on the internet for text that is intended to be read are Times New Roman, Verdana, Arial, not necessarily in that order.

If you want to be very specific about your font you can have an image of text, like my logo above, in which case you can have any font you want, but the search engines won't see it as text. There are some ways around that, but if you are writing text that is generally intended to be read, use one of the fonts from this page on your site.

CSS or, cascading style sheets can be used to house all the font styles for your website and each page references the same "style file" introducing the ability to change the font on any portion of text throughout every page on the site at the same time. For example you could "make all the subheaders bigger", or "make all the normal text areas smaller" with just one adjustment. Websites also leverage groups of fonts for the same line of text just in case the user doesn't have the intended font, it will go down the list and read the next font option until it reaches a default serif or sans serif system font.

See the center column for examples.

Courier 18 pt
article continued in center column >>

Site Map

>> article continued..

Arial 12 pt, extremely common font for the internet. Easy to read, everyone has it.

Arial 11pt Dark Gray

Arial 10pt Dark Gray

Verdana 10 point text. Fun but small.

Verdana 12 point text. Wider than arial, makes text take up more space width-wize.

Verdana 11 point text. On the small size, but works on-screen pretty well.

Times New Roman 12 point - oftentimes the "default" font. Care must be used when using this font to be sure that a font was actually chosen, rather than left default. Color works well for that.

Times New Roman 13 point - Looks similar to Garamond, can be a web sustitute.

Times New Roman 10 point - Very hard to read, too small for serifs.

Times New Roman 24 point - headline - when css is used it can look pretty clean on the web. The bigger the font, the easier it is to read.

Arial bold 24 pt

Verdana bold

24 pt

article continued in center column >>