Importance of Web Fonts in UI Development
Published on 31 March 17
Helios0
Estimated Read Time: 02
The standards of the online world demand for specific characteristics in the UX design. The selection of the font is as important as the overall design because it adds to the aesthetics and matters to the balance of the design. UI and UX are interdependent, so the selection of web font largely depends upon the brand type and its look, functionalities and layout of the web design.
But the conflict among most of the UI designers is the willingness to use a lesser known font and they are bound to use a font that the computers support. For this, you need to consider a few guidelines. Let us first understand what are web fonts.
So What are Web Fonts?
Web fonts are not pre-installed in a system. They are the fonts that are downloaded by browsing online while rendering the webpage. This is then installed in the system and used further for text as a font type.
Popular Website for Web Fonts:
- Font Squirrel
- Google Fonts
- CSS Font Stack
- Fonts.com
Guidelines for Selection of Web Fonts
Resolution
In this mobile and digital era, it is becoming important to be compatible for all devices like tablets or mobile phones with different screen resolutions. And with evolving web designs, the new web fonts can be a problem in different resolutions. As some designs do not scale or sometimes respond to different screen sizes. The modern browsing demands zooming functionalities, in this case, the resolution is a prime aspect to consider while selecting a font.
recommended read - 4 Popular Web Design Trends You Shouldn’t Follow Blindly
Web Design Consistency
When you are designing for the web, mobile viewing and various devices, screens and browsers are to be kept in mind. It is important to ensure that there is consistency of font and it type is visible properly across these parameters. Make sure you choose a font family that brings consistency in design and fits for these parameters in order to offer good user experience and achieve the desired web design impact.
Font Availability
Many fonts are not supported by systems or computer, so there are chances that he fonts may not look similar to what you selected. In this case, the system selects a default font for compatibility reasons. So one needs to also look into this factor while selecting a web font.
Website Performance
With creative web designs and atypical trends in web designing, the web page designs take longer to load due to high resolution images or videos etc. So you need to careful with elements in the web design with text or new kind of font may take longer to load than usual. Thus, selection of your web font can affect the performance of your website. For this reason, you need to consider performance as a vital factor while web font selection.
Search Engines
Last but not the least; you need to meet the standard of the search engines in order to keep up with the rankings. For optimization purposes, you need to select a font that is compatible with the search engine standards. For this, many UI designers convert text into an image to ensure that the consistency in design is maintained and there is no issue with search engine compatibility. Because then it is read as image and not text by the search engine. This can save you from losing on the ranking if in case you have selected a font which is not compatible with search engine standards.
Numbers Highlighting Importance
- 65% of website use a custom font and using custom web fonts
- User read only 20-28% of text on a website. A research by Nielsen Norman Group.
- http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2015/10/fontreach-ranks-the-web-by-font/ take a look at the top fonts this season.
The Checklist for Web Font Selection
- Choose a Legible Font
- Legible Font Size
- Sufficient Contrast
- Right Length of Lines( In-line spacing)
- Appropriate Distinction in Sections
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