Many lawyers and attorneys ask about fonts that are suitable for web design. What font is the best for their website? Can they use the same font for headings and content? Is there a single font I can use for letterhead, and the website?
The answers are very subjective and ultimately it does not matter what a typography expert says or a web artist says, the client usually makes the final decision. Sometimes attorneys just don’t care to get that involved into the website production and in that case they leave it up to the skilled hands of the developer in which case it still does not matter what a typography expert says. Web designers and especially web artists are very opinionated. As a web developer, it can be very frustrating if I pick a color palette or a font and the client rejects it and instead picks one I don’t like. The first 10 times that happened to me, it generated a little bad emo and I was left feeling bad and anything but empowered. After experiencing it enough, I learned to take it in stride with no ill effects… as long as I got paid at the end of the day.
There is actually a definitive book on the subject written by Matthew Butterick and it’s aptly called “Typography for Lawyers“.
And a lot of it is available on the internet in excerpts but it’s recommended reading for attorneys involved with document production.
Matthew is not a fan of Google Fonts for a number of reasons and that may be largely due to the fact that the font directory started small and it’s taken a while to get to the first 100 fonts. It’s not actually there quite yet in fact. But Google Fonts are an outstanding resource for lawyer web design. A website built using Google Fonts will look similar no matter what browser or hardware platform the user surfs in on. Matthew points out that no matter what font the designer uses that “It’s possible to do excellent typography with system fonts; it’s also possible to do awful typography with great fonts.”
OK that being said here is what he likes and does not like in terms of lawyer fonts:
These are recommended:
- Sabon
- Stempel Garamond
- Lyon Text
- Miller
- Minion
- Williams Caslon
- Mercury
These are what he calls “bad fonts”:
- Bodoni
- Bookman
- Sans serif fonts
What is the closest to a font he would recommend that’s currently available on the free Google Fonts directory?
- EB Garamond
Slim pickings indeed. Well I think it’s time to research what other font-face resources are available that might meet Matthews “good” list a little better. When I get them I will add to this post. Until then I’d have to mention that Web Design Workplace clients have picked a very wide array of fonts and there seems to be no way to predict how any individual client will feel when she or he sees one font compared to the next. Sometimes the entire discussion of it is a moot point.
