Dressing Up the Typography on Your Law Firm Website

By Alyssa Mahlberg,
Graphic Designer

One of the most exciting recent developments in online typography is the addition and universal browser acceptance of webfonts. Before webfonts, the safest typefaces to use on the web were Arial/Helvetica, Times New Roman/Times and Courier New/Courier. The world wide web accepted other fonts, such as Palatino, Verdana, Georgia and Trebuchet (the typeface that you are reading right this moment), but even with these fonts you ran a risk of a webpage not appearing the way you intended. 

For example, Palatino is a serif typeface (similar to Georgia) that is installed on most Macintosh operating systems, but only on some Windows operating systems. If a web designer designs a website using Palatino, he or she may be banking on that font being used. If a visitor using a computer that does not have Palatino installed, a default font could be used which could throw off the design or even the intended layout of the site. 

Now, this may sound like a very minor designer's catastrophe that "regular people" would never notice, and it may be. However, on a business website, everything should look polished and professional. The best way to achieve a polished and professional website is to have control over all of the design elements including typography. Typography is one of the most important design elements of your law firm website because content is a key part of your webpage, considering your visitors aren't coming to your website to view images or play games, but find and read information. 

Webfonts opened up a whole new world for designers and typographers on the web. Basically, webfonts eliminate the need to have a font installed in order to view it on a webpage. In other words, your website can now display any font you wish (within licensing restrictions). Included in the long list of available free webfonts, are several of the fonts from Hongkiat's list of designers' top ten all-time favorite fonts.

At IMS, we have been implementing this new web design technique on most of our new websites. Webfonts really give your website a fresh, original and professional look. To see some webfonts in use, see the website for Nickerson Law Group (http://www.estateplanningaustintexas.com), a site we designed for Essential Attorney Julia Nickerson -- or check out our brand new IMS company website (http://www.integritymarketingsolutions.com).