The Canva trap
Tools made it very easy to click through endless font lists until something “feels right”. Great for one-off graphics, less great for body copy that has to carry 2,000 words on a laptop, a tablet and the cracked phone your client refuses to upgrade.
Typography on the web is not about personality first. It is about comfort and clarity first, then personality layered on top.
Three questions before you pick a font
- Can someone skim this on a small screen without getting a headache.
- Does the font look clean at normal body sizes, not just in giant headings.
- Does the style actually match the offer, or is it just trendy this week.
If the answer to the first one is “no”, you are decorating your content instead of serving it.
Body first, headlines second
The biggest typography mistake I see: people fall in love with a display font and then try to force the rest of the site to dance around it. Headlines look dramatic, yes, but paragraphs become a wall of wobble.
Flip it. Pick your body font first. Something boringly legible, with proper italics, decent numerals and a calm rhythm. Then add a headline font that plays nicely with it.
Basic rules that instantly clean things up
- Never use more than two font families on a normal site.
- Keep body text between 16px and 20px on desktop, with generous line height.
- Avoid full-justified paragraphs unless you truly fancy uneven word spacing and rivers of white space running through your copy.
Kerning crimes and spacing sins
You know that feeling when your brain snags on a word for no reason. Often it is not the copy, it is spacing. Too tight, too loose, or wild swings between the two.
Headings in all caps need extra letter-spacing. Body text rarely does. If everything is crammed together, it reads like a breathless rant. If everything is spaced out like a ransom note, it feels cheap.
Typography and trust
Your fonts are quietly telling people whether you are serious. A slightly chaotic layout with solid typography still feels professional. A slick layout with badly chosen fonts makes everything feel like a template you could not quite control.
Good type choices do a lot of invisible work:
- They make your long-form content feel easier to finish.
- They make your forms feel less intimidating.
- They make your pricing look considered instead of random.
A quick typography audit you can do tonight
- Open your site on your phone. Can you read a full paragraph without zooming. If not, bump the body size and line height.
- Check you are not using more than two font families. If you are, choose your favourite two and evict the rest.
- Look at your headings: do they actually help you scan the page, or are they just bigger. Adjust sizes and spacing until the structure is obvious at a glance.
Fonts that work are boring until money shows up
No client has ever said “I signed up because your font pairing was quirky”. They sign up because they understood the offer, trusted you, and did not have to fight the layout.
You can absolutely have fun with type, just not at the expense of legibility. Start with a solid, slightly boring base that makes reading feel easy, then sprinkle personality through headings, accent text and microcopy. That is where your voice belongs.