Web Safe Fonts - How to save your website aesthetics

Your website design is greatly affected by the image assets you use and fonts that you have selected. Past few years have seen rise of font embedding services such as Google Web Fonts or Typekit. They were originally intended to give website a new and fresh look. They rose in popularity due to ease of use. For instance, if you are using Google you can choose any font of your choice. Generate a code and paste it in document. All that you have to do now is reference it in CSS.

Unfortunately, this is not as simple and effective as it sounds. What you thought was super easy and free actually failed! Why? Because if your viewer does not have access to your chosen font, he won’t be able to view it. Instead of the beautiful font that you chose, your visitor will see something random like Times New Roman. And this may be devastating to your website image. It may kill the visual appeal that you paid heavily for to achieve.

Devices vary in their operating systems and have their own default fonts installed in them. Mac Operating systems may have one set of fonts installed in them where as Android system will have a different set. Windows and Linux will have even different ones. You may find it surprising that most of the times you see websites in different fonts than they were originally intended by the designers and developers at the back end.

Although, the end viewer will never realise what has happened but as stated earlier, it will hurt the aesthetic appeal of your website. So what is the solution? Determine a web safe font for your website. Web safe fonts are a set of fonts that are compatible with all operating systems. Web safe fonts are kind of Plan B. This means if your originally selected font does not appear on a device, another ‘default’ font will appear as replacement.

Even though you will lose your original choice, you will still be able to control what your viewers see in your website. At least you will be assured that some ugly font won’t show up for view of your visitors. You will have to see the web safe fonts to select the one close set to your original choice. Below is a list of fifteen most popular web safe fonts: