Typography in web design: how to choose and set type that works

Good web typography is mostly about readability, not fancy fonts. Choose one or two typefaces that are easy to read on screen, set them at a comfortable size with enough space between lines, keep your lines from running too wide, and use size and weight to show what matters most. Get those few things right and your text will feel effortless to read, which is the entire job.

Type is where most of the words on your site live, so it does more quiet work than any other design element. Here is how to handle it well, in practical terms.

Choosing typefaces

You do not need many. One typeface for headings and one for body text is plenty, and using a single well-chosen family throughout is perfectly good. The main thing is that your body text is genuinely easy to read on a screen at small sizes, which rules out anything too decorative or too thin. Save personality for the headings, where a more distinctive face can carry your brand without costing readability. If you pair two typefaces, pick ones that are clearly different rather than subtly similar, so the contrast looks intentional.

Size, spacing, and line length

Body text on the web wants to be larger than people expect, around sixteen pixels at the very least, and often more. Give your lines a little breathing room vertically, so they do not feel cramped. And watch your line length: lines that run too wide make the eye lose its place on the return journey, while lines that are too narrow chop the reading into awkward fragments. Somewhere around fifty to seventy-five characters per line is the comfortable range. These are not arbitrary rules; they track how the eye actually moves across text.

Hierarchy: showing what matters

Type is how a reader knows what is important before they have read a word. A clear page has an obvious heading, sensible subheadings, and body text that is plainly different from all of them. That contrast in size and weight lets someone scan the page and grasp its shape in a second. When everything is roughly the same size, the reader has to work to find the structure, and many simply will not bother.

Common mistakes to avoid

A few traps catch people repeatedly. Text set too small or too light to read comfortably, especially grey text on a white background. Too many typefaces, which makes a page feel chaotic. Lines that stretch the full width of a wide screen. Centring long passages of text, which makes every line start in a different place and slows reading. And all-capitals for anything longer than a short label, which is markedly harder to read. Avoiding these is most of the battle.

What this means for your website

Typography is craft, not decoration: a series of small, sensible choices that add up to text people can read without effort. It rarely draws attention to itself, which is exactly the point. This piece is part of what makes good web design, and readable type is one of the foundations behind every site we design.