Font research is important for this project because I have to pick fonts that are legible by a wide demographic, youngsters who may have only just started reading and may struggle with it. Also, when the demographic spreads across the world, there are going to languages the site is written in that uses the same font, therefore the site needs to be something that can be understood in all languages by very young children.
That said the main site wide font can be a simple sans-serif font, that matches the designs of large organisations like Apples’ ‘San Fransisco’ font and Googles’ ‘Open Sans’ font.
Looking through googles’ fonts featured at (https://fonts.google.com/) there are actually a lot of appropriate looking typefaces, it is simply a case of picking one.
The reason for using Googles’ fonts?
- These fonts are great because they are completely free to use, and require no liscensing whatsoever and are completely unlimited with no caps on usage.
- Cross platform rendering is fully supported by Googles’ content delivery network meaning font stability in different browsers and devices works perfectly.
- Loading times are much faster since they are compressed and are much more lightweight than self-hosted and Typekit fonts.
After the site wide font it is important to consider the other fonts that can be used to enhance the look and feel of the site. This is something I discussed in my design infleunces with the styled tourist guidebook of Amsterdam (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/12/09/design-inspiration-2/). Therefore I think it is important to look at some of the popular fonts in different countries that relate to the heritage of that country.
The system font I have chosen is based on a few different things, after a little research I found that a font that is popular with my target audience is comic sans because it big rounded and fun as seen below;
The problem with this font is that it has been rated one of the worst fonts to use in a design. Therefore I had to look a new, updated alternative version that has the same impact on the target audience. I managed to find the font ‘Varela Round’ which has a similar style;
The problem with this font is when it shown very small it seems too bunched together in terms of the letter spacing, therefore it is important to increase the kerning size;
With the site font sorted out, I was left with searching for the remaining fonts for the specific countries around the world that would require their own font to introduct the country. This was a reasonably easy process as I would find fonts that relate to the specific countries and then use that research to pick the specific ones. This can be seen by the the font examples below;
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