WEBSITES

Layout, Structure, Design

Fonts and the web

One major misconception when designing a web-site is that the font you pick at design time is the same font someone will see once it is published. The reality is that if the person viewing the site has the font installed on their computer, they will see it properly, otherwise their computer will substitute whatever font it thinks is similar. This can lead to a site changing dramatically on different computers and operating systems.

In general it is best to use a font that ships standard with Windows and Mac computers such as Arial or Times New Roman. This way you can accurately determine how your site will look on most computers.

Available Solutions Include: Convert font to bitmap, using CSS, using Flash with embedded fonts, or specify a font family. These methods are compared below:

Convert to Bitmap: This method allows your fonts to look exactly like you intended them, but can be very bandwidth intensive (meaning that the site will take a LONG time to load). It requires uploading the entire site as a jpg or gif file, divided into slices representing links.



Text as a bitmap cannot be resized freely because it is represented as pixels as seen here:



CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): Style sheets are supported by most of today's popular browsers and allow a web designer to accurately specify the size and placement of font. However the type of font still depends on the viewer having it installed on their machine. Font family's should be specified.

Style sheets really come in handy when it comes to specifying font sizes and paragraph settings such as space between lines, margins, borders, etc.

Flash with Embedded Fonts:

Specify a Font Family: Serif, Sans Serif, and Monotype fonts are the main font family's available to web designers.