Anyone who has ever created a homepage will sooner or later be confronted with a problem: Why does my page look a little different on each computer? Sometimes a picture is not exactly where you wanted it to be. Sometimes the distances differ and it is not uncommon for your chosen font not to be displayed on other computers, but to be replaced by a standard font. The use of the fancy font generator comes useful there.
But why is that?
At least as far as the script is concerned, this is easy to answer and now also relatively easy to fix. With magazines it is the case that the writing is printed once on paper and everyone then sees it as it came from the print shop. At least it used to be different on the Internet. If you had specified a font on your homepage, it could only be displayed on another computer if it was also installed there. System fonts such as “Arial”, “Verdana” or “Times New Roman” were preinstalled on almost all computers, which is why they were quickly established as the standard fonts. If you wanted to use other fonts that were not installed on the “target computer”, then these could not be displayed. Instead, the calculator displayed one of the standard fonts as a substitute. And already a homepage no longer looked the way it was intended.
That brought with it completely different problems. Large companies that used their own fonts for their corporate design could not use them online. A uniform appearance of a brand was not possible, Arial as a representative of the sans serif fonts spread.
Modern web design with WebFonts
Nowadays, and with modern web design, things are different. Today any fonts can be used, which are embedded as WebFonts. This means that the font on the homepage is downloaded from the Internet together with the content of the homepage. This means that it is no longer necessary for the font to be installed beforehand on the target computer, i.e. the visitor’s computer. This means a small revolution for the design of websites.
Enlarged representation of staircase effects in fonts
But even if theoretically any font can be used to display your own homepage content, caution is advised. Some free fonts that can be found on the Internet look good, but are not always suitable for German providers because the German umlauts and special characters are simply missing.
Such WebFonts often do not have their own representation for “bold” and “italic”, so that these so-called font styles have to be interpolated by the browser. This then leads to the fact that, for example, when bolded, the adjustment to the normal font style shows unsightly distortions. Make use of the fancy font generator in such cases.
Conclusion
The WebFonts are certainly a small revolution in the design of websites. Nevertheless, this technology must be used with care. Anyone who blindly uses fonts and uses them on their website can experience unpleasant surprises and in the end the page is more difficult to read and operate than it was before. Detailed and careful testing on different systems and devices is absolutely necessary here as well. But then your own website can look more individual than it has probably never been before.
