Get with the "Times", use your fonts responsibly

All of the fonts available in Delivra’s HTML Editor are web-safe and automatically include the font family.

The perceived level of professionalism in your email design can, among other elements, be heavily attributed to your use of font. The fonts you select for your design affect its readability and flow. Fonts should be used carefully in any print design, and especially in web or email design.

Web Safe Fonts: Why Should I Use Them?

Web-safe fonts are extremely common on most machines, whether they be Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever. Using web-safe fonts, you can assume that all of your recipients are viewing your email in the same font that you are. Be sure to include a font family as a fallback. For example:

<span style="font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif">Hello World!</span>

The words “Hello World!” will appear in Tahoma. Should a recipient not have the font Tahoma on their computer, the text will display in Arial instead; if not Arial, then Helvetica, and so on.

If your brand manager demands you use a font that is not web-safe, you can always create that text in an image (although this isn’t a good alternative. Most email clients block images by default, so your recipients wouldn’t see your text unless they enabled their images).

How Should I Design with Fonts In Mind?
As a general design rule, it’s a good idea to use only 2-3 fonts per piece. More than that and your content will likely appear visually jumbled. If you have an email with 6 different lines of information, don’t write up each line in a different font and size. Sure – in theory, you’re making each line of text distinctive and eye-catching, right? Wrong! In reality, you’re making your content look like a scrambled mess. No recipient is going to look at your content and read all six lines of text at once. Try using a heavier, bold font as a headline and a simpler font for the body (and since Comic Sans is a web-safe font, you can even use that – but we’d advise you not to let your designers find out).

If you have a lot of information that you think is individually important, try to number the points of information by importance and design the text from there. It’s possible to guide your recipients’ attention to important areas using fonts, but it’s not so easy to make everything jump out at once.

Celeste Odell | Design Services