Fancy Fonts Your Users Can Still Read

Designing a beautiful layout is not just about choosing the right color/style or picking the most fitting image format. It’s also about choosing fonts that work well for your website’s topic (and are readable to users’ eyes).

To elaborate more about the important role of fonts in web design, I’m beginning a series on fonts this week, tackling the chief issue I have with modern fancy fonts: legibility. What’s the use of using a pretty or nifty font if no one can read what it says, after all?

Why Focus on Legibility?

A site’s logo should be easily read and understood
Content and navigation should be easily distinguished
Headings and subheadings should be emphasized, but not overdone

If we want users to stay on our sites and enjoy the text content we’ve written, we need to make it easy to read our sites. Thus, legible fancy fonts, fonts that are decorative and yet still readable, should be at the top of our design list.

Where ARE Some Fancy Legible Fonts?

After doing a thorough search on my favorite font resource, DaFont.com, I found five fonts each in several fancier categories that meet my criteria for legibility, which is the following:

Each letter is distinguishable from others
Not too thick
Not completely obscured by flourishes

Each font has been previewed using the text “crooked glasses” in lowercase letters, set to “medium” size. Some previews have had to be shrunk to fit in the content space.

Cartoony Fonts

Andrea Karime