Fonts for the web can be a scary subject, but the best design practices are really pretty simple.

First, you should be using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) in your web pages. Believe me, your life will be better for it.

When starting a project, figure out what you want the page to look like in a graphics program with good type tools. Photoshop will do. Determine what font colors, header sizes, line-height, paragraph-spacing and other attributes will look good for the type of web site. Once you know what you want, redefine the paragraph and header tags in your Cascading Style Sheet to recreate your design. Set the font to what you want, but give several choices, because not all fonts are loaded on every computer. For example: p { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } lets the browser choose which font to supply based on the user’s system. Now that you’ve redefined the tag, you can specify the font family, color, size, line-height – even letter spacing and margins – for your default paragraph in all your pages, before ever having to create custom styles.

Use only web-safe fonts. This limits your options, but also limits the damage you can do. Be creative with less and you’ll have a nicer final product.

Click here to learn more about best practices for font usage in web design.