The Way Your Computer Sees Fonts:

First, when a font is used on a website, it is not necessarily the font that your visitor will see. Ack, you say, why is that. If, for example I decided that I wanted to use a rare font (Batik) for the text in the following paragraph.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum.

Because of this, most webmasters will create the titles on a website as images.

This also holds true when you send a document by email. If the font you have used is not installed on the recipients computer, they are not going to see it the way you intended. I discovered this when I sent my bills out with my letterhead created in text. Your computer will attempt to find a similar font to display but it just ain't the same.

Serif and Sans Serif Fonts

The three most common fonts used as text on the internet are:

Arial (Sans Serif) (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog) and

Verdana (Sans Serif) (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog)

Times New Roman (Serif)  (The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy brown dog)

The word Serif is defined in the Oxford dictionary as: Cross-line finishing off a stroke of a letter

as in T.

The Adobe Type Glossary defines a Serif as: Small decorative strokes that are added to the end of a letter's main strokes. Serifs improve readability by leading the eye along the line of type.

The word "sans" is french for without. So a Sans Serif T does not have the small cross lines and flourishes.

as in T.

The Adobe Type Glossary defines a sans serif as: A type face that does not have serifs. Generally a low-contrast design. Sans serif faces lend a clean, simple appearance to documents. The word sans is french for without.

Your browser has settings for default fonts and default text colour so if your webmaster has not coded in the type of font and the colour, the default font and colour will show. On most browsers this is set at Times New Roman and black. (this paragraph is not coded so you are seeing what ever font is set as default in your browser.

Wanting to make sure that the websites we design look the same to you, we have our default settings set at unusual colours and fonts. Our default font is comic, our default text colour is purple and our default background colour is pepto bismal pink. Want to see what it looks like on a site that doesn't code in the proper fonts and colours.

Styles of Fonts

coming soon

3D · Calligraphic Fonts · Brush Script Fonts · Cartoon Fonts · Decorative & Display Fonts · Film & Television Title· Grunge · Handwriting Fonts · Natural Fonts · Sans Serif Fonts · Script Fonts · Serif Fonts · Shadowed · Stenciled · Symbol and Dingbat Fonts · Techno · Typewriter

Dingbats.

Some Cool Font links

What the Font? - a great site to identify that mysterious font that is stumping you. Adobe

Type Glossary - A glossary of typographic terms

Freeware Fonts

http://www.1001freefonts.com/index2.html

http://www.fontpool.com/job_category.html

http://www.fontsnthings.com/

http://www.jumbo.com/mm/fonts/