Face it.  Fonts are fun.  And if they’re not overused, they’re effective, too. But one of the most frustrating things about designing for the web is that you cannot always control the way a web site will look on different people’s computers. This is true with respect to screen size, and with color, and with fonts as well.

There are two types of fonts that appear in the browser. “Straight text” and “graphic text.” The stuff you are reading now is “straight text”. Graphic text is primarily used for the fancier stuff, often containing drop shadows and other font effects. Like this...

That works fine for headings and titles and logos, but you need to be aware of the fact that big graphics slow down the web page and should be used sparingly. For the main body text of the web site, you really need to use “straight text”, like what you are reading now. But the problem is that the end-user will NOT see the page as designed UNLESS THEY HAVE THE SAME FONT ALREADY INSTALLED ON THEIR COMPUTER. Since we don’t know what fonts they have, we can only safely choose from a very short list of fonts... fonts that are generally known to be installed on all computers.

These “web-safe fonts” include the following choices:

Yes... I know... compared to the dozens and dozens of fonts you probably have on your computer, that’s not a terribly exciting selection. But that’s what we have to work with. For what it’s worth, the above fonts are generally available in Bold and Italic, too, but be aware that in some cases, the Bold and Italic do not look very good.

Remember, all the other cool looking fonts you sometimes come across in print or on the internet are still available to us, but we would need to create them as “graphic text”, which is somewhat slower to load, and therefore we would use them for headings and titles and things like that, but NOT for the main body text.