Often a client we are designing a website for wants a particular font and we cannot use it. There are a number of reasons why we may not.
1. The font is not licensed for web use.
2. Its a font that many people don’t have on their computer
3. We feel it is ill suited from a design point of view, for projecting the professional image required for their successfully marketing their site.
Reason one is often a shock to people who assume any font they have on their computer is free to use for whatever they want. Not necessarily so.
Reason three is based on our experience and knowledge of what works but in the end, we defer to a clients wishes. It is, after all, their site.
Reason two is the one we most often encounter and the hardest to explain. The fonts we have on our computer are different depending on whether we are on a PC, Mac or Linux operating system. Also they can differ depending on which software we have. For example, after we upgraded our version of Microsoft Word, we found we had a bunch of cool new fonts installed.
For a person to see a font used on a web page, it has to be installed on their computer or it is replaced by a generic computer font or the same type, Serif, Sans-Serif, etc. So if we use it on a web page, you will see the page fine, another visitor may not.
What a pain!
This font issue became a thorn in the side of web designers wishing to be more creative on their pages as well a please clients, so workarounds were used. One such workaround is instead of text for a headline, a graphic depiction of the text was used instead. There are downsides to this, the biggest being the extra expense of creating a graphic. Another workaround was to try and force visitors to download the font when they visit the site. This has downsides as well, such as disconcerting people with a download prompt when they arrive and degraded site performance. Intellectual property /licensing violations was another potential problem with this workaround.
Over the years was very little progress in finding a solution that satisfied font designers, who deserve recognition for their creations and that worked without impacting the website user experience or load time in some manner. So we have been stuck with the same old safe fonts. The tried and true like Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Geneva and Georgia. There have been additions to the ‘safe to use’ list of fonts but no good solutions to the problem itself.
Things are finally improving…
Over the past few years, hosted font services have emerged and are providing a much needed dash of flair to the web by overcoming the issues I have outlined here. Depending on the service, you need to register and pay a fee but most have a limited free level or some fonts that have no licensing fee. Here is a list of few of these services:
The best news for last…
There are many more and new services coming online all the time… But the one that is making a big splash right now is from…
Drum roll… You love me, you hate em, you can’t live without em… Google. Yes, they now have a great new font hosting service. It’s easy to use [for us tech savvy web developers] and all the fonts are free. Some restrictions may apply such as limiting use to only the web with print projects not allowed. It’s best to check each one.
You still might not be able to have the exact font you want on your web site, but at least now there are some jazzier options to pick from that you know are safe/legal to use. What we recommend is, if they want something a little different on your site, hop on over to Google Web Fonts at http://www.google.com/webfonts and pick a few.
We suggest you test them using the paragraph option tab as well as the sentence option. You want to see how they will look in different situations. The selection isn’t huge yet but will likely grow over time and as I mentioned, the service is free. Pick out a few choices and send your web team [us hopefully] the names and we’ll know what to do with them. It’s best to keep the final choices for the site at two, but no harm in sending more to pick the two from.


