Fonts for easy on screen reading

With million’s of different fonts to choose from, selecting the right font for a particular application can be quite tricky.

It’s especially tricky when picking a screen font or fonts to use on your websites, as they are subject to constraints that fonts used ‘on paper’ do not suffer from. For-instance, if a font is to display correctly in a browser, it must be installed and available on the user’s computer. This alone slashes the number of choices from 1,000,000’s to 100 pretty much instantly.

We can narrow down that 100 even more just by asking one simple but important question ….

‘which of these fonts are actually designed for viewing on screen?’

Yep, luckily someone has already done all the hard work for us! Certain fonts were actually developed with the sole aim of working well on screen.

Here’s a short run down on the only one’s really worth considering…

Extremely similar to Helvetica/Microsoft Sans Serif and commonly found on all pc’s and macs, so a very safe font to pick to ensure as close to 100% of visitors have it on their computer. This font wasn’t originally designed for the screen but it does work very well at larger sizes and it is such a well-known and widely used font that I would still class it as an excellent choice for headlines and navigation, perhaps not so much for large blocks of text, if only for the reason that some of the other fonts I am about to mention can be a little easier on the eye during prolonged reading.

Designed in the 1990’s for Microsoft by the then A-Team of font designers specifically to work well on screen. A very safe choice and has been included as a system font on pc’s since 1996. Works especially well at smaller sizes when there aren’t many pixels to work with, staying as legible as you could ever hope for, but can look strange used in a large headline size.

Again commissioned by Microsoft, it arrived on the scene at the same time as Verdana. Another very good on screen reading font, being slightly narrower than Verdana it works a little better for headlines.

Yet another Microsoft commissioned font! Very similar at first glance to Times New Roman but it has many subtle differences which optimise it for use on screen. If your picking a ’serif’ font, I say always go with Georgia for the web.

Some other fonts also worth consideration are;

I hope you have found this post interesting, we have only really scratched the surface of basic typography here but I hope you can see already how important picking the right tools, or fonts in this case, is when displaying information for your websites user’s.

By removing as much friction as possible from your websites, especially when you’re delivering large amounts of information in one hit, you can only help your users to stay focused on the task in hand, which should be getting excited about your sales copy!

Why not try out a few different fonts on your own websites and see for yourself whether one reads any better than the other, you might just find a simple change of font makes a big difference to readability.