Web Safe Fonts and Colours

On the surface fonts must seem quite trivial in terms of web development, but the font type used is far more important than it appears on the surface. The first issue with fonts is ensuring that the user actually has the font that the web developer has selected. In most cases, a web developer will use one of the web-safe fonts which are fonts that are most likely to be on the users system. Initiatives from Microsoft to include the “Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Impact, Georgia, Trebuchet and Verdana” fonts on most computers ensure that pretty much every computer will be able to display them. Although these fonts were selected because they filled certain criteria such as legibility on a screen, however it could be the case that a web designer wants to use a highly stylistic font or one with a certain aesthetic which works better with the site.

In this case, the user might not have that particular font type on their computer, meaning the web designer would include a “font-family” where they refer to several different fonts with a similar aesthetic to the one that they want in the hopes that the user has one of those other fonts. A particular solution to ensure a user could see the text would be to use images to display the font, but then a user cannot select the text and it becomes a lot messier.

Another issue is web colours, back when the web was young, displays were limited to 256 colours meaning that a web developer would have to carefully select which colours to use so as to ensure the maximum amount of users could enjoy the site at its maximum potential as possible. Although not a problem for most users these days, some users still browse as if they were still in the 90’s so to make web pages as accessible to everyone as possible, sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice some design elements for usability.