Before you invest in web typography
This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. Before you spend anything on web typography, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.
Prerequisites
- You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
- Someone owns it after the work is done
- Body text below 16px is a readability problem, not a style choice
- You have a way to tell whether it worked
What to watch for
Line length between 50 and 75 characters is easiest to read. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.
Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.
The short version
Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about web typography before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Two typefaces is plenty for almost any site — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.