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help with fonts families and sizes

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 3:56 am
by raghavan20
I hv built sites but always had this problem when it comes to choosing fonts and their sizes.

I am looking for suggestions from you guys on fonts that shd be used with normal text on <body>, headings and at other special occasions.

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 6:41 am
by Chris Corbyn
General tips...

Use clean, easy-to-read fonts for the body and anything for navigation (i.e. Verdana, arial, tahoma, times, courier, sans-serif).

Always, always, always provide multiple fonts in order of preference... it's unlikely that your first chosen font is available on all machines.

Don't specify font size in pt, use em (I assume you're using CSS - if not, start now ;) ). Size in pt are rendered differently across the various operating systems and if it look good on windows it may be too small on OSX or Linux... I tend to go for 0.8em for the main body but it depends on the font.

Try to choose colors which contrast (nicely) with the background.

Try to make obvious which text is for navigation and which is not (underline, color, bold etc).

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 6:44 am
by Chris Corbyn
Moved to UI Design/Usability

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 8:19 am
by raghavan20
Thanks for your suggestions, I recently changed to the font family you specified. Thats actually a good one and it gave a different look to the entire site. As you told, I have changed from px to em's. As you guessed, I am working with css for a long time.

Do you know any easy to learn tutorials on making curved - edged tables, simple menus and tutorials for using divs instead of tables?

Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 8:53 am
by nielsene
A List Apart has great tutorials for curved or arbitrary edge divs and general interesting use of CSS.

I especially recommend the following articles there: Generally speaking I find its worth reading just about every item in ther CSS or Design categories. Often starting from the oldest article and working forward as the articles generally build upon the techniques used in previous ones.