Suppose you have spent a good deal of time and money working on your company branding, and your business logo has a beautiful scripted font that you are ever so proud of. Having this fancy logo is certainly fine, but don’t count on translating that same font into all of the body text for your web pages.
When it comes to viewing text on the Internet, you must remember that the way the text displays is reliant on each individual’s computer type, their font library, and their web browser. There are only a handful of fonts that are widely enough used that they are considered safe to use in web design. This list usually includes Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, and Times New Roman. There are a few other popular fonts since computer users are becoming savvier and font collections increase as software companies penetrate the market.
To settle this compromise without totally compromising aesthetic design, web developers can use a series of preferred fonts and backup fonts in their style sheets. For example, you might use Century Gothic as your first preference, followed by Arial (which is somewhat similar) and followed by sans-serif. This will tell the computer: If you have this first font, display it, if not, display the next one, and if still no cigar display the default font for this type.
