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The Ultimate Guide to Diverse Web Safe Fonts

on 9 Oct 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, Guides

by Bogdan

First and foremost, fonts for websites are a crucial component of your site. This is because the type of website custom font you pick for your project will influence the readability, tone, and personality of your website, business, or brand.

Most importantly, if you want the font you’ve selected for your website to be displayed consistently for all of your users, then you should consider using web-safe fonts. These fonts are diverse, fast, reliable, and are pre-installed in nearly all major browsers your site visitors use.

In this article, we will cover the following:

What web-safe fonts are, and why they’re important
The different types of web-safe font families
How to choose the right web-safe font for websites
The Best web-safe fonts you can use in your website projects

But first, let’s begin this journey with what web-safe fonts exactly are.

What are web-safe fonts?

Web-safe fonts are typefaces that are universally available on all major web browsers and operating systems. Since most devices already have these fonts pre-installed, website owners can expect them to appear the same on all devices.

Source: Colorlib

Before web-safe fonts, web designers had a limited set of fonts they could use to determine how text would appear for all of their users. If a user didn't have the same font used on a website installed on their computer, their browser would just display a default font, such as Times New Roman, instead. So, this resulted in web design inconsistencies as site owners couldn’t tell how their web pages would appear to the end-user.

Web-safe fonts solve this problem by ensuring that your website's text looks as intended for every user, regardless of their device. In addition, web-safe fonts are freely available to use and you don’t need to host them anywhere for your site visitors to see. Let’s take a look at the different types of fonts.

What are the different types of web-safe fonts?

Generally, there are five different font families you can use. These include serif, sans-serif, monospace, cursive, and fantasy.

MS fonts also qualify, albeit Microsoft created this font specifically for its digital devices. A good example is the Trebuchet MS font. Trebuchet MS is a versatile sans-serif font known for its stylish appearance and readability.

Serif – These are fonts with serifs, which are extra strokes at the ends of each letter. These fonts are often associated with a sense of tradition, history, and formality. A typical example of a serif font is Times New Roman, which you might see in most academic papers and some formal documents.

Sans-serif – These fonts don’t have serifs. They are more popular with websites and digital content. Arial is a widely used sans-serif font, known for its simplicity and readability. Another good example is Helvetica Neue.

Monospace – Monospace fonts are a bit unique because each character takes up the same amount of horizontal space. This makes them a good choice for coding, where alignment and spacing are important. Courier New is a well-known monospace font often used for programming and code examples. Roboto Mono and Source Code Pro are other popular monospace fonts.

Cursive – Cursive fonts mimic handwriting, with flowing and connected letters. You can use them to add a personal or artistic touch to your text. An example of a cursive font is Brush Script MT, which gives a handwritten feel to your content.

Fantasy – Fantasy fonts are the most creative and diverse category. They come in various imaginative styles and are mostly used for decorative or thematic purposes. Comic Sans MS is an example of a fantasy font, known for its playful and informal appearance.

Each of these font families has its own unique characteristics and can convey different moods or styles in your web design. Choosing the right one depends on the message you want to send across and the overall look and feel you want for your website project.

The type of audience you want to target

Fonts carry diverse cultural and age-specific connotations. This simply means that the type of font design you pick for your website will evoke a specific feeling, emotion, or impression based on the culture or age group of the people seeing it.

For example, serif fonts are typically considered more formal and traditional. They can be suitable, for instance in a law firm website, while a casual sans-serif font could work well for a creative agency. If your target audience is young, go for a font that resonates with them.

Basically, a font can be friendly, progressive, stylish/chic, reliable, traditional, objective, expressive, respectable, etc. Certain fonts such as Bickham Script show elegance, while others like Lavandaria show creativity, fondness, and the list goes on and on.

Readability should be your top priority

Above all, your font text must be easy to read. Opt for fonts with clear and distinct characters. Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Verdana are generally more readable on digital screens due to their clean lines and simplicity.

Check for the accessibility of the font

For a font to be accessible, it must also be legible to people with vision impairments and reading disabilities. In other words, the fonts you pick must have good spacing between characters and clear distinctions between the letters and numbers.

Your site’s brand personality

Think about the personality of your brand. Is it modern, professional, or minimalistic? Is it playful and creative? The font you choose should align with your brand's identity. As we’ve already mentioned, Serif fonts like Georgia can convey tradition and reliability, while cursive fonts like Pacifico can add a touch of creativity.

Explore web font services

While web-safe fonts provide basic compatibility, web font services like Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts offer a broader selection of fonts that are optimized for web use. These services often provide easy integration methods and allow you to enhance your typography choices beyond the standard web-safe fonts.

Tip: Since different devices and browsers may render fonts differently, it's important that you test your chosen fonts on various devices and browsers to ensure consistency. This step is crucial to guarantee that your website looks as intended to all users.

With all these in mind, you can easily add different types of web-safe fonts to your website using Brizy.

How to add web-safe fonts with Brizy

Brizy is a robust site builder designed to help you create modern and stylish websites quickly. Specifically, its built-in Font Manager allows you to easily add, remove, edit, and manage Google fonts on your website. You can also upload other website custom fonts when you purchase the Brizy Pro version.

The best part is this built-in Font Manager is simple, easy to use, and access. You can open it on any text area of your website when you want to inline edit its typography. Then, click on Add New Font to open the Font Manager as shown below.

At this point, you can do the following:

1. Access a list of currently installed fonts for your website in the Font tab. You can delete all fonts in this list, except Lato, which is a default font used by Brizy.

2. To add new fonts, simply click the Add New tab to add new Google Fonts. Enter the font name you want to add, for example, Alice. Then, hit the continue button.

That’s pretty much it. You can now apply that font to your preferred text element, and edit its weight, size, line height, spacing, and more.

3. You can also upload other website custom fonts in the Brizy Pro version. Simply open the Font Manager and click Upload.

Brizy will allow you to enter a name for your font, choose which type of font file it is, and then upload it from your computer. In our case, we’ll upload a font called CreamyMoony. Then, click the Add Font button after setting your font’s weight.

Brizy allows you to add as many font variations as you want. For more in-depth information, watch our guide on how to upload custom fonts in Brizy.

Now, let’s have a closer look at some of the best web-safe fonts you can add to Brizy’s Font Manager. Watch the video below to see it in action:

Best web-safe fonts to use in your website projects

By default, Brizy‘s built-in Font Manager includes the following fonts; Roboto, Playfair Display, Noto Serif, Montserrat, ABeeZee, Lato and many more.

Roboto

This Google Font is typically preferred for its largely geometric and open curves. Roboto is web-friendly and was specifically designed for use on digital screens. It renders well on modern browsers (even on older versions) to display quality text for your users.

Playfair Display

Playfair Display is a transitional serif typeface known for its high contrast and elegant appearance. It's often used in luxury and high-end designs, such as invitations and fashion magazines.

The distinctive characteristics of Playfair Display include its tall x-height, bracketed serifs, and refined letterforms. All these characteristics make it a popular choice for projects that require a touch of sophistication.

Jost

Jost is a modern sans-serif font that is not as well known or overused in current website trends. We feel this is a great option when it comes to free sans-serif fonts because it has no less than 18 weights available, making it very versatile and perfect for any ocasion

Gochi Hand

If you're looking for a casual and free handscript font, then look no further than Gochi Hand.

Its simple yet friendly flow makes it very useful in certain scenarious, especially when you're website is trying to achieve a more personal style. Do not use this with more formal website and also please keep in mind that there is only one weight available.

Dela Gothic One

One of the more bold and strikign fonts available for free is Dela Gothic One. This is awesome to use for bold titles and hero sections. This can also provide good impact for banners or promo sections, because it attracts a lot of eye with its impressive and clean shapes.

GDPR considerations with font libraries

Here at Brizy, we try to be 100% GDPR compliant for users in the EU, so the loading of the fonts from Google Fonts is done via Bunny Fonts.

Bunny Fonts is an open-source, privacy-first web font platform designed to put privacy back into the internet. Bunny Fonts helps users stay fully GDPR compliant due to zero-tracking and no-logging policy and puts user's personal data into their own hands. Bunny Fonts are hosted by BunnyWay d.o.o. - an EU-based company - and were designed to help you stay fully GDPR compliant. No data or logs are ever collected or passed to a third party. Simply put: there is no tracking or monitoring of end-users in any way or form.

Watch this video on our YouTube channel to learn more about GDPR compliance and custom fonts in Brizy.

Conclusion

Deciding on which type of font to use for a website project will depend on your goals, the audience you want to target, your preferences, the tone of your website, and much more. Whatever the reason is, if you choose the right font for your website, it will help you convey the right message to your users; appropriately.

If you’re wondering where to get started, don’t fret! Brizy is a robust website builder that allows you to create multiple web design projects for your clients including websites, landing pages, popups & alerts, newsletters— and anything you can think of for your marketing niche.

Brizy’s font manager allows you to easily add various types of Google fonts and manage them. You can also upload your own website custom fonts in the Brizy Pro version.

With Brizy, you’re not limited at all. Get started with Brizy today, and elevate your web design game.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io