In the world of web design, typography is 95 percent. Therefore, how you present your body text is crucial to your overall website design. Good typography makes it easier for your audience to read effortlessly. For this, it is essential to optimize your typography when you want to improve your user interface.
Here are some useful ways to make effective typography:
Factor in Your Audience and Context
When choosing fonts for your website design, it is important to consider your target market and the context of your body copy. The font you use can convey a certain mood to your layout, for example, serious, funny, professional, or friendly. To help you pick the most suitable fonts for your site, consider your type of business as well as the needs of your audience.
Your fonts have the ability to influence the first impression that users make from your products. If the font your use fits with your brand, there will be a connection with your audience. So, if you have a business website, it makes sense to avoid using fonts that look fun and immature. If your target market comprises young adults, going for too formal fonts may look dull and boring to them.
Work on Mobile Typography
With mobile screens, typography is short of space. The mobile UI comes with certain challenges. You need to deal with restrictions without losing functionality. Mobile typography demands attention to detail, from the right sizing of fonts to line length and tracking.
Compared to website design, good legibility is quite difficult to reach in mobile typography. The font size must not be too small because it will look like an illegible mess on small screens. Also, if the text is too large, it will not fit the small screen. Moreover, you need to care about the contrast level considering a screen with high contrast and ambient light can hurt the eyes of the users.
You also need to think of the functionality of the typography. Smartphone UI includes clickable text parts and you need to make sure that owners use them. If these clickable parts are too small, users are unable to press them with a finger, which can be frustrating.
It is essential to take into account all the details in mobile typography to bring valuable products for your users.
Minimalism Can Be Good
Often, when you want to show all the parts of a digital product, you tend to use lots of various typefaces all in a single website design. But, the result you get is an overloaded design with unnecessary details and lack the appropriate mood.
Try to use a number of fonts for the same layout. Using two or three fonts allows you to create a crucial contrast between elements of the body copy along with having the balance and right message of the website design. Applying various styles like bold or italic should be minimal. While these styles are ideal for emphasizing important parts, but overusing them can make the text look disorderly and messy.
Moreover, do not overwhelm users with unnecessary information in your copy content. Although it is the job of a writer to create appropriate text, you need to collaborate with them to make sure the text fits the website design.
Use a Drop Cap
A drop capital is the large initial capital you usually see in newspapers and magazines. They were originally an artistic way to make manuscripts look more attractive. Today, the drop cap increases the readership of the body copy by 13%. Studies revealed that utilizing a drop cap on major paragraphs for a single website design contributed to the sales increase by 251%.
When using drop caps in your website design, make sure they are clear. There is plenty of room for styling, but that strategy works by opening a loop in the mind of your prospects. As soon as the drop cap hits them in the eye, they need to know what the rest of the word is near the loop. They should know the rest of the word immediately, as well as the rest of the sentence.
Therefore, do not lose the connection between the drop capital and the copy. For example, placing it too far to the left, or removing it too much from the style of the rest of the text, can make it disappear; thus, defeating the purpose.
Avoid Unconventional Formatting
It is easy to get carried away when working with typography on your website design Brisbane. Here are some guidelines to remember:
- Underlining should only mean clickable links. If text is underlined online, that usually indicates a clickable hyperlink. If you underline any other text in your content, it will confuse your reader, and make you look amateur and incompetent. Many people still make this mistake. Often, old-school marketers take the web and not educating themselves about modern technology, including typography.
- Do not use centered and right-justified text. Users typically use the left-hand margin to guide their eye path. If they are unable to find a consistent left margin they will have difficulty reading. This is because users tend to spend most of their attention on the left side of the web page, following the F-shaped pattern. For this reason, indenting images into the left margin and having multiple columns is a bad idea.
- Be consistent. Use coloured typeface cautiously, as users may mistake it for hyperlinks. If you need to use colours, stick to two or three at most. Make sure the secondary colors on your website design appear only where they will not look clickable to the users, for example, in headings, long lines of text, quotes, etc.
- Do not change between fonts or sizes for no reason. Pick a single font and size for your body copy. You may use another font, and other styles or sizes, for subheadings, headlines, pull quotes, and so on, but make sure not to overdo it.
Typography is vital. Again, if it is 95% typography in web design, then it is definitely worth tweaking.
