How To Choose The Right Web Fonts To Build A Website?

Typography means the arrangement of type art and technique to ensure the displayed written language is legible and appealing. Typography has a vital role in a brand's identity – either it makes or breaks a web page design's overall effectiveness along with the message. As a distinct website design factor, Typography significantly impacts all other UI design facets, accessibility, usability, readability, aesthetics, and branding.
Through carefully and appropriately chosen fonts, the users understand the brand’s tone and message. This integral impression sets up customers’ faith in a company.

However, typography is a lot more than choosing an appealing font for web design. Fonts establish the visual structure and graphic balance. With the right fonts in place, the customers have an excellent website experience.

The Best Designs To Do And With Applicable Fonts
Sans serif fonts are perfect for brands to create innovative, sophisticated, and bold designs. So, it is suitable for –
● Startups
● IT Companies
● Fashion industries

Serif fonts stand out for transitional brands to gain a novice establishment. These are –
● Consulting agencies
● Law firms
● Insurance companies
● Financial companies

Handwritten fonts are ideal for brands seeking to create elegant and personalized web designs. These firms include –
● Beauty salons
● Food products
● Baby products
● Cosmetology
● And more

Font Types To Use for Web Sites
Designers come across various exceptional font designs to differently spread the brand messages. In general terms, these typefaces have specified ways of using them –

1. Serif Fonts
Usually a vertical stroke beginning and ending a letter – Serif naturally brings a stroke together smoothly while giving a clear ending. In printed editions, the edges almost touched each other seeming like uniting the letters into one word. Serifs are in different styles and types, including elliptical, rectangular, triangular, oval, and more.

2. Venetian Antique (Humanist)
Typographic representations of antiquity often include distinguishing elements like calligraphy and a particular style of handwriting. The broad proportion of characters and a few flattened serifs form a rule for these fonts. So, these fonts are having a shallow lowercase height and a minimum contrast between the main and connective strokes. Guardi, Adobe Jenson, and Arno are examples.

3. Old Style Italian-French Antiqua (Haralds)
Closer to modern typefaces than humanist typefaces, it is part of an old-style antique. Less calligraphic heralds appear like printed letters and are no longer gradually seen as handwriting imitations. Characters are more proportional while serifs are sharper and longer. Galliard, Janson, and Sabon are examples.

4. Antique Baroque
Transitional or realism fonts are the other names of this typeface, which is distinguished by the combined old style, typical for broad stylistic fonts as well as elements of the new style. Serifs are smoother with no calligraphic influence. The elements get a lot more refined forms. The typical examples are Melior, Joanna, and Clearface.

5. Antique of the New Style
Antiques of the New Style fit for big lettering, like headlines or eye-catching texts. The reason is these characteristics greatly emphasize the letters' elegance. Its contrasting strokes and minimum thickness of the contrasting ones, make the serifs long and thin. So, this font is not suitable for large amounts of text. Examples include Bodoni, New Caledonia, Walbaum, and Aviano.

6. Slab Serif
This typeface has a unique appearance with strong rectangular serifs without roundings. There is little to no contrast between the main and connective strokes. Slab serif fonts are more reader-friendly since they look lighter. Examples are Sentinel, Belizio, and Clarendon.

7. San Serifs Fonts
Embossed Sans Serifs letters are carefully inked for clear visuals and readability. These scripts contain a few features. In the British classification, San Serifs fonts are classified into four categories –

i. Old Grotesques
The distinctive styles having varying saturation around the irregular curves and characters are the features of Old Grotesques. Most of these fonts contain just the uppercase letters. Covering all the early chopped scripts, the Old Grotesques is featured by the roundness of a few letters like "R". The strokes' thickness is generally slightly different, but at least it affects the pattern or calligraphy. Franklin Gothic and Monotype Grotesque are examples.

ii. Neo Grotesque
Comprising of the most common sans serif fonts, the Neo Grotesque scripts have evolved from the old Grotesque. These fonts are primarily closed-single-width fonts with little to no contrast with the single-frequency construction of the letter "g," but they have lost most of their qualities. These fonts have been formed with an emphasis on simplicity and neutrality. These fonts are trending and popular among modernists. Examples include Bell Gothica, Helvetica, and Bell Centennial.

iii. Humanist Sans Serif
The strong calligraphic influence with the form based on the pen's or brush' origin is the main characteristic of Humanist, both including and excluding serifs, ie., high contrast of strokes. A lot of these fonts are having true italic styles. Myriad, Trebuchet, Gill Sans, and Frurtiger are examples.

iv. Geometric Sans
Geometric Sans is developed on the simplest geometric shapes, like squares or triangles. Kabel, Avant Garde and Futura are examples.

8. Calligraphic Fonts
The principle point of these attractively handwritten fonts is clarity. Calligraphic scripts have a voice of their own. The sub-types are –

i. Handwritten Fonts
These typefaces imitate handwriting or calligraphic style. Based on the writing tools, the handwritten scripts are divided into fonts imitating writing with a sharp-pointed nib, or a broad-nib, brush, and other tools. These items are seen on title pages, posters, and the like. Snell Roundhand and Ashley Script are examples.

ii. Glyptal Fonts
The majority of the Glyptal Font scripts are considered serif fonts, however, they are imitations of letters that were cut out of metal or another hard substance. At most, these items comprise the uppercase letters. Usually, the serifs are small and display the hammering characteristics apart from a design feature. Friz Quadrata and Trajan are examples.

iii. Display Fonts
Display fonts scripts are used for typesetting cover pages, posters, labels, banners, and more. It comprises the elements with shadows, manuscript, and gravure. Typeface, for the maximum part, can be easily read, but there are a few tricky variants. Broadway, Banco, and Algerian are examples.

iv. Blackletter Font For Website
These typescripts imitate medieval handwriting using a pen. As a rule, the letters are characterized by narrow proportions, broken strokes, strong contrast, high decorative effect, and great richness. Karson, Glaive, and Cambridge are examples.

v. Gaelic Script
Gaelic script originates from medieval manuscripts. Generally, today its main use is for decorative purposes. The examples are Erin, Celtic, and The Shire.

How Should The Perfect Font For Website Be Chosen?
Keep in mind some licenses limit some of these font's usage. Even if the majority of the available fonts are free to use, still the restrictions should be double-checked before using a specific font group. These fonts are found in the Google Fonts library, or else a membership fee is to be paid for utilizing the Adobe font collection. This is how the typographers approve of whatever font is used.

1. Defining the Brand Tone Clearly
The web font stands for brand and business. Next, the available brand tones are considered to be mild and conservative, confident and stable, and creative. Deciding on it aids in the correct selection of a proper font. Target audiences and the feeling to experience from brand's online presence form the backbone of font type. The Sans Typeface renders a modern appearance to the website while serif fonts are ideal choices to symbolize simplicity and minimalism in formal tone.
The brand's nature, project type, website tenure, the importance of functionality and the number of visual elements as opposed to texts or vice versa are to be taken into account. Even demographics, the audience's job, and interest are equally important. The easy-to-read text on left-aligned sentences, or justified alignment even dictates the correct tone. More friendly are ragged texts. 45 – 80 characters with space included is the most desirable line length.

2. Choice Of the Appropriate Typefaces
After being sure about the intended outcome from typography, now the font families should be checked. Web font choices should be limited to a maximum of three groups. Based on their importance, rank the fonts and classify them into three groups –

i. The Main Font
Users mostly see the main font, and hence have a crucial role to convey a brand's appropriate picture. Applied to the larger texts, the primary fonts catch the website visitors' sight at the first instance. Better is maintaining some similarities in the primary font's style with the brand logo.

ii. The Secondary Font
The secondary fonts apply to the main sentences. Readability mattes for this font group to ensure the audience's eyes are relaxed while reading the lines.

iii. The Accent Font
It is optional, but if another typeface is to be used, then it should be used for elements like navigation or CTAs. It easily attracts the audience's attention while encouraging them to click on the section. Harmonizing the style will get tougher when more fonts are used. But combined fonts used create various mods in various parts of a site.
Most famous versatile fonts contain different weights like “bold”, “normal” and “light”. This variety is good for creating a perfect web page appearance.
To pair different fonts, first, a sensible contrast is to be established on how the fonts appear, by changing size, spacing, and style.

3. Compatibility And Performance Check
The first step to ensure compatibility is selecting the perfect web font for pages to be easily read on desktops and mobile devices. Heavier weights are sometimes applicable for mobile screens to make the script readable.
Page loading speed directly impacts the user engagement, hence after the font loads on the website, checking the performance is necessary to ensure a lot of time is not being consumed. An alternative is to be considered if the selected font takes too much loading time. Audiences are to see the typefaces and not system fonts.
How much the browser is supporting some fonts should be checked beforehand. The precautionary step is selecting fonts similar to those used if the system fails to load the main ones.

User convenience and brand identity communication decide the web font selection. The chosen fonts should be easily readable and accessible to different users. The web fonts should scale for different access devices with various screen sizes while supporting the fast page load. Since fonts translate a brand's uniqueness, so fonts must be coherent across the website, logo, and other imagery used for showing a brand. Ultimately, the brand becomes familiar to users.