Fonts: Website Enhancement through Font Choice

Improve your website by choosing a psychologically appropriate font. Audience perception is affected by psychological impact of fonts in websites and documents. Would you deliver a doctoral dissertation in baby talk? A sports play-by-play in legalese? With so many fonts available, how can you decide which font will most effective suit your purpose? A Wichita University study recently examined the “personality traits” of several different fonts through an electronic survey. The charts below from the University of Wichita site show how different fonts were perceived and how they would be used by respondents. To illustrate the psychological impact of fonts take a look at these two passages, both with an identical message, but the blink is quite different.
Improve your website by choosing a psychologically appropriate font. Audience perception is affected by psychological impact of fonts in websites and documents. Would you deliver a doctoral dissertation in baby talk? A sports play-by-play in legalese?  (Appropriate for formal invitations)
Improve your website by choosing a psychologically appropriate font. Audience perception is affected by psychological impact of fonts in websites and documents. Would you deliver a doctoral dissertation in baby talk? A sports play-by-play in legalese? (An appropriate choice for a friendly scrapbooking project.)

To use these psychological study results, first determine your audience and the impression you want to make. Use no more than three fonts to convey that message (two preferably). In addition, keep font sizes to no more than three on a page.. Portray reliability by using the same fonts throughout your site and in all your offline publicity consistently. Want an opinion on your blink? Contact the author for a site survey.

Sources:
http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/81/PersonalityofFonts.asp