Design

Fun Fonts

The web is becoming more fun.  Social media is infusing the internet with large doses of the human touch in so many ways. 

One of the ways that designers are looking to make websites more fun is the use of new fonts.  Since we have been stuck with the same few font families that can be read across browsers and computers, we have gotten pretty bored.

In my last entry, I talked about sketchy design and how we are seeing more hand drawn graphics on line.

I came across is a resource for free hand-drawn fonts.  There are many categories of hand-drawn fonts on this site, and I downloaded one to create the graphic for “recent updates” in my website’s top banner.

An exciting new free service of Google is the Google Font Directory (beta).  It offers 18 new fonts that designers and developers can integrate into the CSS of the website.  I’m using one of these fonts for my large headers on this site.

The one down-side to using these embedded fonts is that there are going to be a few older browsers that won’t support it.  In that case, the browser will use the next available font in the CSS font stack for that website.

Design

Sketchy Design

When we think of the aesthetics of websites, most of us probably think in terms of color, type, graphics and photography.  We are also likely to think of it in terms hard lines, boxy sections or maybe fancy Flash sites with lots of movement and animation.

Something that we are seeing more of these days on the web are sketchy, hand-drawn themes and elements on websites.  Very trendy right now are the hand-drawn or painted icons for social media and other computer related graphic representations. Just the presence of these can add a whimsical and personal touch to a website.

We are in the age of building more interactive relationships and community around business, and less of a cold, corporate feel. The aesthetic of a website becomes even more important in reaching out to the audience and building relationships. 

Sometimes, though, it can be easy to get carried away with styles and scare away viewers with too much of a good thing. It’s great to have fun with they style of a site, but to keep the balance of other elements that keep visitors coming back –– ease of navigation, clarity of information and clean layout to name a few.

Here are a few examples of sites that are using some “artsy” elements and themes and still maintaining clean and simple organization of information:

Biola University
Neighborhood Homework House
Red Velvet Art

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