http://www.coolcats.com/Website-Design-Articles/Typography.php
The above link has apaper about design layout concern.
What fonts should you use on your website? Amateur-built sites often specify a font that is not installed on most computers, so viewers will see the site with their web browser’s default font instead. The novice designers doesn’t see anything wrong since they have the font on their computer.
The default font isn’t not so bad, is it? It certainly can be.
The default font for Firefox on Windows is Times New Roman 16 if serif is specified and Arial 16 if sans (non)-serif is specified. 16 point Arial is huge to most people while 16 point Times New Roman is still large, but not as much so.
Additionally, Times New Roman is much better to read when printed, but the audience will see Times New Roman in their browser. Not only is this difficult for onscreen reading, the large size may break the layout.
The correct way to specify fonts on web pages is by specifiying what is called a “font family”, which we do that like this: font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif.
- Comic Sans is a cartoonish font and is rarely appropriate.
- Helvetica is in widespread use and it looks okay on Apple computers, but it is horrible on Windows systems when viewed smaller than 11px due to bad kerning (character spacing).
- Verdana looks great at any size, but the problem it has is that it is larger than Arial.
- Chicago, Swiss Regular, & Trajan Pro appear on many pages built with Apple computers. You will never find these fonts present on a Windows computer.
- Small fonts such as Sevenet & Silkscreen are present only on Web and Flash designers’ computers. They only look right when used in a size that is divisible by 8; 8px is illegible on Apple computers and 16 is too large for most folks on Windows machines.
Microsoft has a good page outling what fonts are safe to use, meaning they are likely to be presnt on most computers. When we want to use a font that may not be popular, we do so by using a graphic for “special” text.
Never try to present all website text as graphics! It is suicide regarding your search engine ranking, your website will be slow as molasses, and the few readers who find you in spite of your dreadful search engine rankings are not likely to come back.
