Typography in Web Design

Unfortunately, not all computers used to view web pages are loaded with the same set of font faces. Some font faces are more commonly available than others, but none are universally available on all computers, all platforms. So web pages will be rendered differently from one viewing browser to another where the preferred fonts are not available.

Absolute control over the font face used to display your web page on a viewing browser is not possible (at least not for the majority of text on your page). Instead, your web developer builds pages in such a way as to specify preferred font faces. The viewing browser meets the web developer's specified preference as best it can based on the fonts available on the viewing computer. The browser uses the first preference if available; and if not, it uses the second preference, and so on down the specified series.

Each row below corresponds to a single preference. We recommend these groupings because the font faces grouped together here are used similarly and are among the most commonly available fonts, and therefore will lead to the most consistent renderings, although not always exact font face matches.

If you require preserving a precise appearance for text on all platforms, this can be done for small amounts of text, by embedding text within a graphic image, as in the case of a logo. However, this technique cannot be applied with large amounts of text without dramatically increasing page load time, and cannot be done with text that is critical to SEO ranking, as search engines do not read text embedded within images.