How Important Is Your Font?

You want your new web site to look so amazing that it immediately, slickly, consistently convinces visitors to stick around, click your strategically placed links, contact you or best of all, order something. If only it were that simple. 

Time for a reality check: competition with competitor sites is fierce. And even if someone clicks the URL in your email signature and finds you, chances are slim to none they will stay long enough to savor your brilliant content. According to Nielsen Norman Group, “users often leave web pages in 10-20 seconds.” The deck is stacked against you already.

What, you ask, is the best antidote for Impatient-Visitor-ADHD Syndrome? 

Font-SelectionA simple four-letter word: FONT. Yes, the right font, deftly used in the right place at the right time by a talented site designer, can give you a fighting chance of motivating visitors to stay long enough to consume your message. Yes, that’s the point.

Sound easy? Not so much.

First, block your calendar for a thorough site-browsing and/or print collateral tour to locate your perfect font. Next, copy the font into an email or .doc with attributes intact – or take a screen grab. But wait. If your web designer doesn’t recognize what you send, you’ve got yet another challenge.

In a perfect world, there would be just a few dozen major fonts with straight-forward names that describe the power or mood they convey. Nope. The number of Google Web-supported fonts now exceeds 600. And the names of the most popular business fonts are anything but straight-forward: Oswald, Arvo, Helvetica, Century Gothic, Fruitiger, Tahoma, Garamond. REALLY? What were those font creators smoking?

Remember the popular quote from William Shakespeare’s play ‘Romeo and Juliet’, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet”?

We thereby propose a revolutionary new taxonomy for font names: “No-Fluff”, “For-Older-Eyes”, “Kewl Beans”, “Drama Queen”, “Profitable”, and “Dizzy”.

Have your own names in mind? Tell us. We’re all “Open Sans” ears.