How To Choose The Best Typography For Your Website

Typography. It’s one of those very complex things that can be a bit mysterious to people who aren’t designers. We see typography everywhere, on signs, shop boards and even in magazines, but its power is often underestimated by businesses. You see, the font on your website can quite literally determine how you’re perceived as a brand. I recently wrote a post that mentioned that branding should convey the personality of your business. Just as you would keep your branding consistent, you should also be aware of the fonts that you’re using on your website and what they say about you. I’ve written 3 useful tips to help you decide how to choose the best typography for your website.

Know Your Brand

It’s essential that you know your business inside out, and understand who it is that you want to target. Some very important questions to ask yourself are:

Who are you?
What are you trying to achieve with your brand?
Who are your target audience?
How do you want your brand to be perceived?

These questions will help you narrow down the type of fonts that you can use on your website. For example, if you’re brand is targeted at children, you may want to choose fonts that are very simple and playful. If you’re aiming to reach young creatives, you may want to find unique fonts that stand out. It helps to start with a list of words that come to mind when you think of your business. You can then search for fonts that you think match these words and phrases.

Content Is Key

If your website content will be heavily text based, you’ll need to pick typography that will be easy to read. In this scenario, you should ideally stay away from script or calligraphic fonts for body text, as it will make things look cluttered and be quite difficult to read. If your website will be predominantly image based, you could consider using bold fonts in your headings, that will also complement the images you’ll be using. A good tip is to create your website content first, and then choose your fonts.

Do Your Research

Tools like Typ.io and Pinterest are great for finding visual references for typography. You can find plenty of inspiration and interesting font combinations on these platforms. Another really useful thing to do is to compare contrasting fonts to see how different typefaces will look together. Canva Font Combinations is a very useful tool to help you do this. Google Fonts is a good place to start if you’d like something completely free, but if you prefer to pay for a more unique font Creative Market is a great resource. It’s very important that you have the correct licensing for the fonts you want to use. If you use free fonts, it’s up to you to check a font’s licence status to see if you can use it for commercial or just personal use.

Want to manage your business and not your website? If you’d prefer to leave this to a designer, get in touch to learn more about our maintenance packages!