Having a good font (yes, I know typeface is the correct term) is crucial to your website. Just like every other part of your website, your font is giving your visitors subliminal messages about you and your business. Anything from informal, to professional, artsy, clean, modern, etc – your simple choice of a font is suddenly not so simple.
<
p id=”yui_3_17_2_1_1443036225430_66872″>But beyond choosing the fonts you like, I specifically want to remind you of the importance of limiting how many different fonts are on your website.
Oftentimes, the main issue on a website isn’t that it has a bad font for the message presented, but that it has too many different fonts so that there are mixed signals. One of the quickest fixes most websites could benefit from is merely toning down their font choices to merely 1, or possibly 2 fonts.
On almost all of my websites I limit my fonts to 2 per website. Those 2 fonts, however, are used in 3 different sizes and is occasionally in bold or thin versions. This helps bring clarification to specific parts of my websites without sending a new message altogether.
Your website might be in a different industry, with different customers, messages, goals, etc – but I can tell you that you’ll benefit from consolidating your visual message through no more than 2 fonts. In the same way that you have only one verbal message that you communicate, you should only be communicating one visual message.
As an adapted quote from one of the articles I read last week:
“Make every font choice perfect and limit the number of fonts to perfect.”
What are your thoughts? Any websites you’ve known of to do this well, or poorly?