The best Web Fonts

For web designers finding exciting fonts for a website has never been easier. Thanks to modern web fonts, there are virtually no limits to your cre­ativ­i­ty. With the right com­bi­na­tion of web-safe fonts that reflect the character of a site, website owners can make a lasting positive im­pres­sion. We’ll tell you what web fonts are and what makes web-safe fonts so important.

Web fonts are digitized fonts that can be in­ter­pret­ed by browsers. Such fonts are primarily intended for use in HTML or XHTML documents – i.e., for use on the Web. Web fonts are char­ac­ter­ized by the fact that they work in­de­pen­dent­ly of the operating system, since they are not loaded from the local font col­lec­tion but from an external web server. To this end, the desired web fonts must simply be included in the CSS rule @font-face and specified in the font stack.

Since the in­tro­duc­tion of @font-face in CSS2, tech­ni­cal­ly all fonts can be included in web projects. Pre­vi­ous­ly, web designers only had a small selection of standard fonts such as Arial or Times New Roman at their disposal. The term “web-safe fonts” was coined, which initially iden­ti­fied the standard fonts that were in­dis­pens­able for smooth web display.

Today, web designers can more easily meet corporate design spec­i­fi­ca­tions thanks to the vast col­lec­tion of available web-safe fonts. Good fonts for websites are among the important foun­da­tions for im­ple­ment­ing over­ar­ch­ing marketing strate­gies, making them almost in­dis­pens­able for a company’s suc­cess­ful web presence.

The overview shows that the choice of the ap­pro­pri­ate format is important, but no format can reliably guarantee that the desired web fonts will work on a user’s end device. Mobile devices with older browsers, for example, lack support for the stan­dard­ized format WOFF (Web Open Font Format) and its successor WOFF2.

For users of Internet Explorer this is even more of a problem. The various versions of the Microsoft browser support the EOT (Embedded OpenType) format, which is not supported by any other Internet browser.

The broadest support is available for the TTF (TrueType Format) and OTF (OpenType Format) formats.

The term font generally refers to all char­ac­ters that have been designed according to an identical design concept. If there are several variants of such a font that differ, for example, in terms of stroke width or tracking, then they are referred to as a font family. For example, the fonts Segoe UI, Segoe Light, and Segoe Semibold belong to a single font family.

Web friendly fonts are suitable for various ap­pli­ca­tions. When choosing a font, you should pay attention to two things in par­tic­u­lar: the leg­i­bil­i­ty of the font and its emotional impact. The medium also plays a major role. In so-called serif fonts, in­di­vid­ual letters have small cross strokes at the end of letter bars, which make it easier to read small print. However, this typeface is not always ideal for reading on a monitor.

The features of different web font cat­e­gories listed above are gen­er­al­ized. In practice, the use of un­ex­pect­ed fonts can be a good way to stand out from the com­pe­ti­tion. To find the right web fonts, you should heed the following advice:

• Consider theme and audience: A visually com­pelling com­bi­na­tion of good website fonts is useless if it doesn’t match the theme of the page. Ob­jec­tiv­i­ty is best conveyed by a mix of serif and sans-serif fonts. Hand­writ­ten fonts are more eye-catching and appear livelier.
• The more text your page contains, the more you should focus on func­tion­al­i­ty. In addition to read­abil­i­ty, it’s worth con­sid­er­ing that mobile device users will access your page via mobile data transfer by default, which means that unique web fonts may un­nec­es­sar­i­ly increase load time.
• Limit the number of web-safe fonts. It is usually best to stick to two different fonts, one for body text and the other for headlines and special ty­po­graph­ic mark-up.
• Look for fonts that are distinct and create a good contrast. The interplay of serif and sans-serif fonts is a good example here. However, it’s advisable to keep a healthy balance. If your web fonts are styl­is­ti­cal­ly very different, this could create tension and website visitors are likely to notice. If the two fonts are too similar, ex­pe­ri­ence has shown that this also has a negative effect.

While designers struggled with a limited choice of fonts in the early days of web design, they face the opposite issue today: they need to keep track and select the most suitable fonts from an enormous number of web fonts.

For this reason, we have gathered a list of the most popular and safe web fonts below.

As of Windows 3.1, the sans-serif font Arial has been one of the standard fonts supplied with Microsoft operating system. Arial has long been in demand for use as a web font, both for headlines and in para­graphs. More recently, the classic font has in­creas­ing­ly become more of a fallback solution.

Download options:

• fonts­for­web.com
• fontsfree.pro

What Arial is for Windows, Helvetica used to be for Apple. Clean lines and shapes char­ac­ter­ize this sans-serif font – a standard choice for many companies. On its 50^th an­niver­sary, filmmaker and artist Gary Hustwit paid tribute to the font in the doc­u­men­tary of the same name Doc­u­men­tary “Helvetica”.

Download options

• da­font­free.io
• boldfonts.com

Palatino is an old-style serif font drawing in­spi­ra­tion from let­ter­press printing. However, the lighter web font is also an in­ter­est­ing option for blog texts and online magazines. The font, released in 1948, was named after the Italian cal­lig­ra­ph­er Gi­ambat­tista Palatino.

Download options

• da­font­free.io
• da­font­fam­i­ly.com

The Baskerville family of web fonts began in 1754 as a tran­si­tion­al Baroque antiqua typeface. Its creator was the English ty­pog­ra­ph­er, John Baskerville. The mixture of strong stroke contrasts, upright shadow axes, and hor­i­zon­tal­ly accented serifs was con­sid­ered a technical milestone and, like many of his typefaces, was fre­quent­ly copied during Baskerville’s lifetime.

Download options:

• cu­fon­fonts.com
• cdnfonts.com

The Century Gothic sans serif typeface was designed by Monotype Cor­po­ra­tion in 1991. It is largely based on the Futura al­ter­na­tive Twentieth Century, but unlike the latter, it is char­ac­ter­ized by a more uniform type width, among other features. As a web-safe font, Century Gothic is par­tic­u­lar­ly popular for headlines and sub-headlines.

Download options:

• fonts­for­web.com
• free­fonts­fam­i­ly.com

Consolas is a web-safe font that was in­tro­duced with Windows Vista in 2007. It is designed for de­vel­op­ment en­vi­ron­ments and sit­u­a­tions where a non-pro­por­tion­al font, i.e., a font with a fixed character width, is needed. In web projects, Consolas is suitable for dis­play­ing code snippets, for example.

Download options:

• bestfonts.pro
• download-free-fonts.com

The Garamond font family has been used since the 16th century. Because of its excellent leg­i­bil­i­ty, the serif font is one of the most important and widely used fonts in let­ter­press. Its softer, rounder edges make Garamond a great web font al­ter­na­tive to standard serif fonts such as Times New Roman.

Download options

• cu­fon­fonts.com
• fonts­for­web.com

The Georgia pro­por­tion­al font was designed by Matthew Carter for Microsoft in 1996. From the start, the aim with this baroque antiqua was to achieve the clearest possible display and optimal read­abil­i­ty on computer screens. With the in­creas­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty of blogs, the web-safe font found its way online ten years later.

Download options:

• down­load­fonts.io
• cu­fon­fonts.com