Typography has a significant impact on the overall look and feel of a website. Choosing the right fonts can help to convey a sense of luxury and sophistication while also feeling fresh and modern.
A well-designed typography system uses contrasting font sizes, weights, and styles to establish visual hierarchy on your site and add visual interest. Distinctive, consistent typography can build trust with your users and support the growth of your brand.
Serif fonts
Whether serif or sans serif, the fonts you choose to use on your website convey important information about your brand. In addition to being readable, your fonts must also match the tone of your content and create the right emotional connection with users. Depending on your audience, different fonts can have entirely different meanings and connotations. For example, serif fonts can communicate a sense of tradition and stability, while sans-serif fonts are often perceived as being modern and sleek.
Aside from conveying your brand’s tone and style, typography can also be used to establish a visual hierarchy and organize the content on your site. Using different font sizes, weights, and styles to differentiate between headings and body text helps to keep your design organized and easy to navigate.
Hero Sections
The hero section is the first thing a user sees when they land on your site, and it’s an opportunity to capture their attention and make them want to stay. One way to do this is by incorporating bold fonts into your hero section. While the majority of hero sections on websites are done with sans serif fonts, serif fonts can be a great option for this type of content as well.
Some of the most iconic serif fonts include Didot and Verdana, which are both neoclassical and were designed in the Renaissance style. They have been used in logos and titles for decades, and they continue to be popular because of their elegance and sophistication. For a more modern look, try pairing your serif font with a sans-serif font such as Helvetica or Arial.
Sans-Serif Fonts
For shorter text settings like headers, subheadings, and text in infographics, a sans serif font is a good choice. The simple letterforms of sans-serif fonts are unencumbered by the small details found in serif fonts, making them easier to read at smaller text sizes. In addition, sans-serif fonts can be used to convey a sense of modernity and flexibility that is desirable for many digital products and services.
When choosing a font for your hero section, it’s important to remember that web browsers can only render a limited number of fonts correctly. As such, you should avoid creating designs with fonts that are not web-safe, and instead, stick to the default fonts offered by your preferred font library. If you must use a non-web-safe font, consider implementing a font stack in your CSS file that contains backup fonts that the browser will fall back to if your primary font doesn’t render properly on any device.
