Typography

Chapter 4 of The Principles of Beautiful Web Design was about typography and how to create type that reflects the theme of you web site. Most choices to be made concerning type are in regard to the space around letters and text blocks rather than the actual font type. There are many online communities devoted to the topic if typography including: http://www.typofile.com/

There are only a small amount of font families supported by the two leading operating systems. There are nine font families known as the safe list. They are:

1. Arial
2. Arial Black
3. Comic Sans MS
4. Courier New
5. Georgia
6. Impact
7. Times New Roman
8. Trebuchet MS
9. Verdana

CSS style font-family properties can be used to control the fonts used in your web site. They are really useful because you can list the type of font which you would like used in order of preference. If a viewer does not have your first choice of font style is will go to your next choice. If the viewer does not have your second font style choice it will go to your third choice. Then you would list a generic font family similar to your font choice. This way a viewer who does not have any of your three choices installed on their computer can view your web site.