Choosing the right font for your blog

Blog design is important, very important. And one of the most prominent components in any blog design is the choice of typeface. Get it right and your readers smile and grow in number. Get it wrong and they reach for the close button, their eyes watering and their heads aching.

If you have a text only blog, with no major graphical design components, like Upstart Blogger, then your choice of fonts is partly limited by your audience.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to stick to the conventional tried and tested typefaces that wandered blearily onto the web all those years ago.

I won’t bore you with all the psycho-babble about which fonts portray you as cool, which portray you as business minded and all that other nonsense that keeps all those ‘top ten fonts you must have’ lists spinning around the blogosphere. Choosing a typeface for your blog must be your decision. And to make that choice you simply need to know what fonts are available, choose the one that suits you, choose a couple of others for your style sheet to fall back on just in case some of your audience doesn’t have your first choice installed, and away you go.

For instance, the Upstart Blogger font stack specifies Hoefler Text, followed by Georgia, followed simply by Serif to make sure the text gets displayed no matter what. It’s a simple arrangement that allows me to specify a gorgeous but relatively rare font, since it is only standard on Mac, to begin with, followed by a font that is available on Mac, Windows and Linux, and then, just in case, whatever generic serif the system has knocking around.

Other good serif fonts that stand a good chance of being seen are Palatino (known as Palatino Linotype on Windows) and Times New Roman. For the more esoteric option take a look at Miller Text, Adobe Caslon Pro or my personal choice, Hoefler Text.

If sans serif is more your thing then don’t, whatever you do, specify Arial. It’s a nasty, cheap knockoff of Helvetica. Thankfully there are plenty of sans serif fonts to choose from. At the high end consider Myriad Pro, which is installed on a lot of systems along with most Adobe software, including Acrobat Reader. It’s a beautifully cool, in the literal sense of the word, typeface. From there you can go to Gill Sans, Optima and Lucida Grande. A trio of fonts that could happily grace the most stylish of blogs. For a more Swiss style consider Helvetica. The only reason I don’t include this in my front line of sans serif typefaces is that the default Windows alternative to Helvetica is Arial, and you know how I feel about that. And then, if all else fails, you’ll still find Geneva and Verdana on most operating systems, before you land at the bottom of the pile in the mongrel kennel with Arial and Trebuchet MS.

Of course, there will be other fonts available on different installations. You just have to make a choice that allows you to deliver your chosen style to as many screens as possible whilst making sure all the other screens still enjoy your blog, even if they don’t have your first choice of typeface.

If you have graphical text, perhaps adorning a photographic header, then the sky is the limit and you can choose whatever typeface you wish. And the only advice I will give you here is to always choose quality. Don’t waste your time with freebies or knock offs, and of course, don’t use Arial. But you know that already, right?

I’ll leave you with a number of font foundries that should be in your bookmarks for easy access whenever you need a typeface. This list is by no means exhaustive, and feel free to add to it in the comments, but all of these foundries are high quality.

In no particular order, and with no superfluous descriptions, Emigre, Font Bureau, Porchez (currently open in my browser with one very beautiful typeface being charged to my credit card ready for use in around half of the ten blogs I’m working on), Underware, House Industries and Joshua Darden.

Aim high, go for quality and your blog will shine.

Ashley Morgan is a UK jazz trumpet player and owner of independent record label 447 Records. Ashley Morgan is the trumpet player with Enormous.