7 very common mistakes to avoid in web typography

Despite the great impact of choosing a typeface in a web projectIt is not at all difficult for you to meet one of those clients who is totally determined to use a typeface style and size without taking into account certain rules and totally disregarding the advice of the most professional. We must never overlook that there are certain basic standards to apply style and fonts to our texts and written content in a professional and harmonious way.

Among the most important rules that you should pay attention to today, I am going to propose seven essentials in web typography:

• Use capital letters: In large areas flooded by text or in the body of our articles we should never use capital letters (perhaps we can add a couple of capitalized words to highlight some other concept but on exceptional occasions. Here is an example: NEVER use capital letters for large concentrations for text or titles.

• Unreadable text size: Be careful with the size that you set in each of the areas of your website. The most recommended sizes are those that we find from 11 points, although it depends on the area in which we focus. Monitor the result on each of the platforms or supports and make sure that both the mobile version and the web version are the appropriate sizes.

• Excess creativity: Forget those fonts that are more baroque and have excessive flourishes. These types of creative fonts are usually very good for designing logos or for very specific projects, but under no circumstances to star in large masses of text. If you do, you will cause a feeling of overwhelm in the reader and an excessive visual overload is not going to help your visitors continue reading.

• Combination of sources: You are about to choose the font for your web project. You are between a rock and a hard place because you consider that the Helvetica font is more suitable and can be quite good, but on the other hand you think that a Palatino is just what you were looking for. In the end you decide to use both and worst of all is that you combine them in a carefree way by a whole sea of ​​letters. Congratulations you have made it! You have got rid of your great dilemma, although well there has been collateral damage without the slightest importance: You have created a messy project, without identity and cleanliness, but nothing happens, eh? (irony).

• Excessive use of centered text: There are certain circumstances that force us to use a structure with our centered texts, such as an enumeration of concepts, the presentation of works and / or photographs ... but this in general terms should never be used. Presenting text aligned to the left or justified will always accentuate the feeling of order and cleanliness. You already know that order is an objective that we must always seek in our projects.

• Inadequate contrasts: Within this point we talk about all kinds of contrasts. Contrasts, for example, with changing fonts and styles (bold, italic, underlined ...), colors ... As for the subject of colors, the most academic, simple and clean thing is that we always use one color (two at most and one of them should be black). Too much contrast is not good. We use contrast in any of its variants to give a certain prominence to a concept or to draw the attention of our audience to something defined. Si these marking contrastes each of minutes you're going to drive everyone who reads you crazy. So be a little cautious. Every time you use one of these expressive tools, you must do so with a justification. Because you think it looks nice is not a justification and because it is not;)

• Incorrect leading: The spacing is another important aspect in the final result of our project. Try to respect the spaces and that all the elements keep enough distance so that there is not a feeling of overwhelming and extreme density.

Before finishing I would like to leave you a small emergency kit. Most web designers and programmers tend to use what is known as "safe fonts", among them are the following, although of course if you choose any of them it may be because it fits with the project in question: Verdana, Geneva, Sans-serif, Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, Serif, Courier New, Courier, Monospace, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Arial Black, Gadget, Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, MS Serif, New York, Lucida Console, Monaco, Comic Sans ... (the last one doesn't strain, right?)