Typography In Web Design – All You Need To Know

There are a lot of elements to consider when designing a good website. Although most of these elements like UX and UI, Content Architecture, and use of Visual Elements are covered very often online, one very important element that does not get covered or talked about enough is “typography in web design”.

Typography in web design plays a major part in the performance and success of a website as it directly influences the readability of the website’s content along with some other performance factors of the website.

It is also worth mentioning that typography in web design is not a simple element to get right as well. It’s not just about choosing a readable font, there are a lot of moving parts involved here and one small mistake can affect your website in a negative way.

With that said, here in this article, you will learn all about typography in web design so that you can design and develop a website that will give your website visitors a more seamless experience and take your website to its success.

What Is Typography In Web Design?

In the simplest terms, typography in web design refers to how the text on a website is displayed to the readers (website visitors). Typography in web design helps the readers of your website to easily consume the content as well as offer a good UX to them on the website.

Always keep in mind that your content is the backbone of your website. If your content is unreadable, you have just set up your website for failure.

Most people also think that typography in web design only refers to the type of font that is being used. But in reality, there are some other important elements as well such as colors, styling, alignment, tracking, leading, etc. All of these elements combined help you implement an effective typography strategy on your website.

We know that we used some technical terms in this section and you might not know what they mean. Not to worry as in the next section we will dive deep into those terms as well.

Terms In Typography

As you were able to see in the above section, there were a few technical terms involved. In order for you to continue reading this article and better understand it, it is better for you to know what each of these technical terms means.

• Typefaces & Fonts – Most people think that typefaces and fonts are the same things. Although they fall into the same category, they are actually two different things in typography. Typefaces are referred to as a certain type of letter styling. Some examples are sans-serifs and serifs. While on the other hand, fonts are referred to as a certain type of styling a typeface gets such as size and weight.

Image Source: https://snowball.digital/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-a-font-and-a-typeface

• Font Weight – Font weight is referred to as the overall thickness in the font of a typeface. For example, there are some typefaces with the font that are bold and there are some that are thin. Although bold and thin are two of the most common font weights, you are able to choose from other weights such as semi-bold and regular as well.

Image Source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.text.fontweights?view=winrt-22621

• Body Font – Body fonts are the typeface styling of the body of the content. Keep in mind that the content body does not include headings, but the respective paragraphs under a heading or without headings on a webpage.

Image Source: https://www.typewolf.com/top-10-body-text-fonts

• Type Scale – Type scale is the pre-defined set of font sizes that are being used on a webpage. Usually, there are different sets of type scales for headings from the body text of a webpage to clearly show them apart and have consistency across the entire website.

Image Source: https://creativemarket.com/blog/typographic-scale

• Kerning – Kerning is the spacing between individual letters or characters in the text of a web page. You are able to close the gap of the letters or widen the gap of letters if needed to get the desired text effect.

Image Source: https://www.creatopy.com/blog/kerning-typography/

• Tracking – Just like kerning, tracking is a method of spacing between characters of a particular word. Whereas kerning can adjust the spacing with individual characters, tracking can only adjust the spacing between an entire word.

Image Source: https://www.indesignskills.com/tutorials/letter-spacing-tracking-typography/

• Leading – Leading is referred to as the space between the lines of text. If there is a paragraph with 5 lines of text, leading helps you adjust the space between those 5 lines.

Image Source: https://fabrikbrands.com/what-is-leading-in-typography-leading-in-graphic-design/

• Font Family – A font family is a collection of similarly styled fonts that offer slight variations in a specific typeface.

Image Source: https://alexanders.com/additional-resources/font-types-styles-and-families/

• Display Fonts – Display fonts are the type of fonts that are being used on texts that need to grab the attention of the reader fast. They are usually larger in type scale and are typically used as headings, pull quotes, etc.

Image Source: https://threerooms.com/blog/what-is-a-display-font

Types Of Typefaces

Now that you know what typefaces and fonts are along with several other technical terms in typography, let’s look at the main or otherwise most commonly used types of typefaces in web design.

• Serif – Serif is a type of typeface that includes a small line at the end of each character or symbol with a larger stoke in the respected font family. Serifs are usually more toward the official side of things and they tend to improve the readability of long paragraphs.

Image Source: https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/the-different-types-of-serif-fonts-with-serif-font-examples–cms-37673

• Sans-Serif – Sans-serifs is the opposite of Serifs typeface as it does not contain the small line at the end of each character with less stroke width in the font family. This type of typeface is towards the more casual side of things and renders well on displays, and as a result, they are a recommended option for use in web design. It is also worth mentioning that “Sans” in “Sans-Serif” means “without” in French. Thus, the elimination of the small line in the characters.

Image Source: https://www.postprepress.com.au/whats-the-difference-between-serif-and-sans-serif-typefaces/

• Slab – Slab, also known as slab serif is a typeface with characteristics of serif that are bold and thick. This type of typeface is mainly used on text that needs to grab the attention of readers.

Image Source: https://design.tutsplus.com/articles/best-slab-serif-fonts-ready-to-download-now–cms-35768

• Script – Script is a typeface that represents dynamic handwriting. They are usually used on special elements such as personal notes and offers displayed on a webpage.

Image Source: https://threerooms.com/blog/typography-series-what-is-a-script-font

Importance Of Typography In Web Design

Ah, the importance of typography in web design. A section that we were all waiting for. As we mentioned at the start of this article, typography is one very important element of a website design process as it directly influences the success of a website.

Here in this section, let’s dive deep into some of the reasons why typography is so important in the website design process.

· Improves Readability

As typography is implemented on the text on your website, it directly influences the readability of your content. As we mentioned earlier, the content is the backbone of your website and if it is unreadable to your website visitors, they will bounce to another website. Would you consume content from a website that is hard to read? No, you will bounce and visit another website.

Not to mention, having a non-readable typography will induce eye strain and tiredness in the website visitors as well.

This can be due to using a very distracting font, no proper leading, etc. If this is the case on your website, your website visitors will bounce in a heartbeat as nowadays, they have zero patience for underperforming websites.

On the other hand, if your website offers a good typography that enables your website visitors to seamlessly consume the content with clear readability, they will be hanging around your website long enough for you to get them to convert.

· Improves UX (User Experience)

Typography has a large impact on the overall UX of website visitors as well. As we mentioned in the above section, a poor typography selection on your website will provide a lot of readability problems for website visitors. This will create a bad UX for the website visitors and your website will get negatively affected by this.

Not to mention, search engines such as Google takes UX into account when ranking your website on search results. As a result, if your website offers a bad UX due to poor typography, your SEO performance will also drop.

Therefore, having good typography on your website will allow you to offer your website visitors a good user experience making them stay on your website longer to consume your content while at the same time getting in favor of Google and ranking higher on the search results.

· Helps With Business Branding

The brand of a business is very important to stand out from the competition in any business industry. Businesses spend a fortune building a brand and typography plays a major part in it as well.

When businesses design websites, they must incorporate a typography that matches their brand. This helps them establish their brand identity even stronger within the online community of their target market.

A business website with typography that does not match the brand at all will be seen as unprofessional. Which is never a good thing for a target market to see a business as.

Having a typography strategy that matches well with your business brand will make your website stand out, will make the target market more confident in your website, and will help you increase your business brand awareness much more effectively online.

Not to mention, this will improve the website’s overall visual aesthetics as well.

· Improves Accessibility

There are a lot of people using the internet with some sort of disability. A good website will cater its website content to these people as well and improve accessibility.

A good typography strategy will offer a typeface that will be consumable by all types of users enhancing the legibility and readability for people with disabilities such as poor eyesight, aphasia, dyslexia, etc.

For example, if your website targets more towards the elderly market, it is almost certain that they might have some sort of eyesight issues that makes it hard to read some text on a screen. In this case, you are able to offer a much bigger, and clear font on the screen for better readability.

This will better establish your website as professional and offer a great UX to all the users as well as taking your website one step closer to its goals.

· Maintain consistency

This is a similar point to the one we talked about above on improving the business brand. When you implement a typography strategy on your website, you create consistency of text all across the website.

This will make your website look more professional to the website visitors while at the same to offer a well-organized content structure. For example, if you are using a sans-serif typeface on your body text, a website visitor will be able to easily differentiate headings from text bodies allowing them to read your content more effectively without getting confused.

· Maintain A Website Hierarchy

Maintaining a good website hierarchy is crucial for any business website as it allows website visitors to navigate through the website seamlessly.

Your typography plays a major part here as well. The main goal of website hierarchy is to clearly differentiate pieces of content from one another. Having a good typography strategy will help you do just that as you are able to highlight important content pieces with different font styles (keeping the consistency of course) and differentiate headings from text bodies.

This makes it easy for your website visitors to scan the webpage (especially pages with bulk of text) and read sections that they are interested in reading.

For example, a blog post may contain a main heading, otherwise known as the “H1” in huge block letters and will have subheadings “H2, H3, etc” with a slightly lower font scale and bolding to offer website visitors a proper visual hierarchy representation.

Otherwise, your website visitors will have a hard time reading your content providing them with a bad UX.

· Taps Into Emotions

Another very important thing when it comes to typography in web design is that typography is able to tap into people’s emotions. This is extremely important if you want your website visitors to feel certain expressions.

For example, let’s say that you sell survival knives via a website, the typography of such a website must be strong and bold as it needs to convey to the website visitors the feeling of toughness and fearlessness. While on the other hand, if you have a website that sells baby clothing, the typography must be soft and cute conveying a happy, calm, and cute feeling to the website visitors.

With that said, choosing your typography options correctly will allow you to control their emotions and guide them toward an action you wish them to take.

Common Typography Mistakes In Web Design

Now that you know the importance of typography in web design, let’s dive into the most common mistakes that webmasters make when it comes to typography on their websites so that you can avoid them and take your website to the next level.

· Using Too Many Fonts

There are some websites that use too many fonts in their content. This is a huge mistake in terms of typography as you should always keep the number of fonts used in a website to a minimum. Using too many fonts on your website creates inconsistency and will make your website come out as unprofessional to some website visitors. Not to mention, using too many fonts can affect the visual aesthetic of your overall website as well.

We recommend only using 1 to 2 fonts and 3 if absolutely necessary. Also, be strategic about the places where you use different font types. For example, use a different font on sections that you want to stand out.

Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/725009239982531987/

· Using Poor Legibility Fonts

A font must be easy to read for website visitors. If the font that you choose on your website has way too many styling elements such as a cursive font, it will make it hard for some website visitors to read your content. This is another mistake that we see most webmasters do as they include highly decorative fonts with poor legibility to provide a better visual aesthetic but sacrifice readability along the way.

To overcome this mistake, make sure to not use script typefaces on the important text and use sans-serif or serif typefaces as they tend to offer the most readability and clarity on a website.

Image Source: https://anchordigital.com.au/read-between-the-lines-why-legibility-and-readability-is-essential-for-ux/

· Poor Leading

As you know by now, leading means the space between text lines. Having too much leading or too little leading can affect both the readability and the visual aesthetic of a website. This is a very common mistake we see on most heading tags of websites that must be avoided at all costs. Having the proper amount of leading will make your website look more aesthetically pleasing and the text easy to scan and read.

When it comes to having proper leading, it usually depends on the font you are using and the type scale you are using. A best practice here is to test out some leading options and pick a leading value that looks good. The goal is to have a natural space between the links of text without too much space or too little space.

Image Source: https://blog.webcopyplus.com/2011/01/27/bad-typography-kills-good-web-content/

· Poor Text Alignment

The alignment of text is a direct influencer of how the content looks on your website and the readability. Especially on smaller screen sizes such as mobiles. There are some websites that use “justify” as their default text alignment option to match up the spaces between a section of a webpage which is really not a good choice as it makes it hard for website visitors to read. Not to mention, it does not look good as well.

We recommend you use “align left” as it offers a natural structural flow to the text that makes it easy for website visitors to read the content just like reading a book.

Image Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2015/02/7-simple-rules-for-mobile-typography/

· Ignoring Responsive Design

Nowadays, most internet users use mobile devices to browse websites. With that said, your website’s mobile version must be properly optimized. Most webmasters don’t really optimize their typography for mobile. This will cause some text to be oversized, undersized, and out of alignment offering a poor UX for mobile website visitors.

Right after you finish designing a webpage, make sure to check your responsive version (mobile version) of the web page and pay special attention to the text. See if there are some inconsistencies in the headings and body of text. If you find any inconsistencies as there is a good chance there will be at least some, make sure to fix them as soon as possible. Also, make sure to investigate the font scale as well.

There are a lot of websites that have very small font scale that is hard to read on a mobile device. Make sure that your website doesn’t have this issue and if so, fix it immediately as well.

Image Source: https://www.browserstack.com/guide/common-web-design-mistakes

· Lack Of Contrast Within Text 

In order to differentiate text from one another, there must be contrast involved. For example, to differentiate a heading from a body text. This can be done by using slight color variations or text bolding. It is as simple as that but this is an area that most webmasters oversee. As a result, their content has no proper contrast, and will make it difficult for website visitors to identify different sections of content and make the website look unprofessional.

This is a very common mistake we see in most website footers. If your website has some links displayed such as quick links, service links, and contact links. Make sure to use some bolding on the link headings to clearly notify the website visitors of what the links contain. The same goes for the content body of the web pages as well. Have some bolding on headings and highlight useful keywords to offer more contrast.

Image Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/

· Overuse Of Bold And Italics

As we mention in the above section, you are able to use bold text to provide some contrast. But you also need to keep in mind that too much of anything is bad. Using too much bold text or italics will also affect the readability of content while at the same time making the content look crowded. This is not something that you must have on a website as the content must be easy on the eyes of the website visitors and scannable.

Make sure to use bold text only in the most important places such as headings and on body text keywords that are most important. The same goes for italics. Use them strategically in your content and use them to differentiate certain words from the other words of text.

Image Source: https://twitter.com/WesKrill/status/1430778685951549441

· Lack Of Text Hierarchy

When it comes to typography in web design, there are certain guidelines that you should follow such as content hierarchy. While this is followed by several websites, there are still some that don’t. Having no proper hierarchy on your text will once again affect the readability of your content and make your website look unprofessional. For example, having subheadings and body text higher up than a main H1 heading is a good example of a bad content hierarchy.

Here is a common hierarchy to follow, first goes the main heading, then goes the subheading (if there are any), then goes the body of text, and then goes a button (CTA). If there is an overline to your text, then that overline will go above the main header. It is that simple. See the image below for better clarification.

Image Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-hierarchy

Best website typographic practices

Now that you have completed about 95% of the article, the only thing that is left for us to take about is the best practices of typography in web design. Also, take note that although we covered the most common mistakes of typography in web design in the above section, you are able to take those points and turn them into some additional best practices to the points we are going to cover in this section as well.

· Choosing The Correct Font

Choosing the correct font is absolutely crucial for the success of your website. Remember when we said to choose a font that is easy to read? Well, there is more to it than you think. When you choose a font for your website, it not only has to be able to read easily, but match up well with your band as well. Most businesses just choose a default font.

There is nothing wrong with that except for some businesses, these default fonts don’t match well with their brand.

For example, let’s imagine that you run a website that sells baby products online. If you use a basic sans-serif typeface with a bold font type here, it will not match well. This is because baby products are meant to be soft and cute, not strong and bold. Therefore, the best option here is to use a typeface of serif with a medium to thin thickness font to show off a soft and playful typography that matches well with your brand that is also easy to read and scan.

Image Source: https://wpastra.com/templates/baby-store-04/

· Keep The Tracking Structure Formal

As we talked about earlier in this article, tracking refers to the space between words of text on your website. There are some typefaces and fonts that have way too much tracking or way too less tracking making the content of the website look mushed together and hard to read. This is an issue that commonly arises on mobile devices as the content gets compressed to fit the smaller screen sizes.

With that said, you must always investigate the tracking of your content and if they seem to be off, you must always fix them manually. This will help you offer a good visual representation of your content and make it easy for your website visitors to read the text. Also, adjusting the tracking on your content is not a hard thing either as major CMSs like WordPress make those adjustment options easy.

Image Source: https://uicookies.com/website-header-design-templates/

· Use White Spaces Properly

White space refers to the space around text on a website. Believe it or not, this is actually an element of typography as it helps the text of a webpage to pop out more and contribute to the readability of the website visitor. White space is also known as “negative space” in some instances.

The goal here is to have a proper balance of white space. We have seen several websites online that use too much white space causing reading difficulties and eye strain as too much white space increases the brightness of the screens. On the other hand, websites that have too little white space make the content of the website look overcrowded again making it hard to read and directly affecting the visual aesthetic of the website.

Therefore, make sure to have a proper balance of white space within your content to offer a good user experience to the website visitors.

Image Source:  https://www.justinmind.com/blog/white-space-design/

· Have Strong And User-friendly Headers

The main job of a header is to indicate what the page and each section of the page are about. Having your headers properly structured allows website visitors to easily scan through your content and allow them to find the sections they wish to read quickly and efficiently. Therefore, each of the headings on your website must be properly represented as a header that will grab the attention of readers.

First, the headers of the website must have a much bigger font scall than the body of the text. Also, the header can be a different type of font but must be in the same typeface (keep in mind to not have a very different font for headers from the body of text. Only have a slightly different font). Not to mention, it is a good practice to have a higher thickness of the headers than the body text.

Following these will make sure that your website headers are properly structured and represented in the proper way. 

Image Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/on-page-seo/header-tags/

· Have A Good Amount Of Text Density

Text density refers to the number of words in a text area. This affects the readability of your website content. The more text density you have, the more crowded the text feels to the readers. This does not mean that less density is the answer either. If there is less text density, then there will be too much white space.

In order to have a good text density, you have to eliminate all the unnecessary text on your website and include only relevant and useful information. One of the main goals here is to make the text on your website easily scannable to a reader. Therefore, if you have too much text in a paragraph, make sure to divide it up into two or three paragraphs to offer some room between the text.

Image Source: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.59.1539.xii.t

· Avoid Using All Caps

There is a trend in the web design industry to use all caps (capital letters) in the content. This is really a bad idea as using all caps affects the readability of text. One very common place to see this is on the headings of web pages. Especially with certain typefaces and fonts, all caps can be a big mistake.

Therefore, make sure to avoid all caps all together and if you want to have that effect of all caps on your text, an alternate method to getting a similar effect is that you can always capitalize the first letter of each word on headings.

Image Source: https://blog.prototypr.io/all-caps-on-ui-good-or-bad-2570f14dc457

· Use Text Colors

Using text colors is another great way to bring uniqueness and contrast to your blocks of text. Now, when we say use colors, we don’t mean to use all the colors in the world in your text. The best practice is to use one other color (probably your main brand color).

Also, this does not mean that you can use colored text everywhere. You can only use colored text on links within your text or highlight certain keywords. Make sure not to use the same color for both links and highlights as it will confuse the readers.

Another point to keep in mind here is that if you are using font colors, make sure the colors do not get blended in with the background. For example, most often a website background will be white, and using lighter ash color on your text will make the text hardly visible. In this case, you have to opt in for another color even though your brand colors don’t blend well with the text.

Image Source: https://wpdatatables.com/change-font-color-in-wordpress/

· Avoid Animations In Text

Some webmasters use text animations to have a modern feel to the website and have some uniqueness to their website. This is a huge red flag as animation affects the readability of text. Especially for certain people with disabilities.

The text on your website must be kept simple. Adding animations will just be useless if the text is unreadable. Not to mention, animations will distract the website visitors and also slow down your website as well. These are two things that you really don’t want to do on your website.

With that said, make sure to keep your text simple and clear without any flashiness. If you for some reason need some animations, make sure to add them to other non-text elements on your website such as graphics and other visual elements.

Gif Source: https://freefrontend.com/css-text-animations/

Final Thoughts

There you have it, everything that you need to know about typography in web design in one article. We hope that you were able to learn the value of website typography here. Keep in mind that typography in web design is not an easy thing to get right the first time, you might have to do some testing and adapt toward the results. The important thing is to never give up on typography and optimize till you nail it.

If you have any questions or have any insights to provide, please make use of the comments section below.

Also, if you are someone who is planning to launch a website online and needs professional help to handle your website design project from start to finish, we are here to help you out! If you are interested, make sure to contact us here. 

Until next time, cheers!