Improve your web typography

Good typography is a key factor in a successful website. If your copy is clear and easy to read then it is more likely to get read by your visitors.

There was a time when web designers had no control over the fonts and font styles on their websites. These settings were controlled by the website visitors browser. Today, however we can now style our copy almost as we like and have many fonts available for us to enhance our websites. This extra freedom can lead people to get a bit too creative with their typography, often with poor results.

If you follow these basic rules you will struggle to go wrong:

• Use a pro­fes­sion­al font, avoid novelty fonts, monospaced fonts (where each character is the same width), and system fonts.
• Never use more than three fonts on one website.
• Size should be 15-25 pix­els on the web.
• Line spacing should be 120–145% of the pixel size.
• The average line length should be 45–90 char­ac­ters (in­clud­ing spaces).
• Use curly quo­ta­tion marks, not straight ones.
• Make sure foot and inch marks are straight, not curly.
• Make sure apostrophes point downward.
• Put only one space between sentences.
• Never use underlining, un­less it’s a hyperlink.
• Use centred text sparingly.
• Use bold or italic as little as possible.
• Don’t confuse hy­phens and dashes, and don’t use mul­ti­ple hy­phens as a dash.
• Use ampersands spar­ing­ly, unless in­clud­ed in a prop­er name.
• Use proper trade­mark and copy­right symbols.