Many (don’t even want to use a number here… hahaha) years ago when I set out to design my first website for a client, I was super excited. Coming from a print design industry, web design was a new challenge. I sketched and doodled for a long time and finally came up with, what I thought was, very creative design. The client was in the flower industry (their niche was weddings) and so the images were colourful and gorgeous. In their print material we used a fancy script font, very romantic right? In print absolutely…

I went to meet with my web developer and with a big smile and expecting high praises for my design, I spread all my layouts in front of him. It was only a few minutes of him looking over my design before he crushed my soul and said: “Pretty, but not gonna work. Stop thinking print and start thinking web.”

And it was that day that I learned a very valuable lesson about fonts.

When designing for web, it is important to use “web safe” fonts. These are fonts that are common and are available on all devices. If you include a “fancy” obscure font in your web page design, chances are that viewers who don’t have the font will not be able to see it and the page will end up looking all jumbled up. If your client does have an obscure font in their branding and you need to use it as a header for example, create it as an image in a png format to remove the background colour.

Needless to say, that soul crushing moment was also a pivoting moment in my design career, moment that completely changed my mind set when it comes to web design.

Any of you who are reading this had a similar soul crushing moment you want to share?

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