Puff Out Your Chest

Just a quick note on some thoughts on web credibility and how to position your company today...

You should always aim for your online appearance to be one step beyond what you actually are. Puff out your chest. Look bigger, fancier, shinier. Appearance is everything. If I learned one thing from staying up too late in 1984 is that it's better to look good than to feel good.

What I mean is that if you're a neighborhood store and you have an online presence it should look like you're city wide. If you're city wide it should look like you service the whole region. If you're regional it should look like you're a national company. If you're national it should be international. If you're international you should look next level. Always look bigger and better than you think you are. Push for that next level. It's not even about growth really, though if you appear like you are you certainly won't see growth. In fact if you don't push for that next level you'll risk shrinking.

It's about the credibility this time around. If you're an accountant who wants to build a firm, what should your website look like? Should it look like a 40 year old starting fresh working from the spare room above their garage, or should it look like a professional firm that's been in business for 100 years? Should your new restaurant online look like a local dive bar, or like one of the coolest places to hang in the city? It's not misrepresentation, because maybe you really are just a 40 year old working from home, but that doesn't mean you're not a good bet. You're showing your credibility by having a high quality, non template, designed experience. A template site your cousin's son builds in Front Page just won't cut it, and you know it.

Think next level, and have your stuff look like you're bigger than you are, and you'll see more success online. Be bigger than you are. Puff out your chest.

But I Want My Text Pretty!

So Microsoft and Apple have renewed their font licesnsing agreement. I guess it's a good thing. Fonts on Windows and OS X will continue to be relativily simliar for users on the web. We're still really limited to some fairly boring and common, if not downright bad fonts. It'd be nice if both platforms could expand their common font libraries, but I guess it's asking too much for these companies to make my job easier at no real sacrifice to themselves. So next time you want to use some fancy frilly text on your website, realize that if you want it to be text, which you should, and not an image, these are what you're limited to as far as fonts.

And yes, you can do things to 'get around this' like use images for your text (bad idea as it'll kill your search engine rankings and make it difficult to print/read/edit/copy text), or ask your users to download a new font to use the site (great way to make people hit the back button...works almost as good as basic web security to keep people off your page), and more. Those are the easy ones though. Basically if you want more than 90% of your users to see your site the way you intend, you better intend your text to use these fonts.

Ok here they are. The Windows font name, the Mac font name that we put in, if different, so that it looks close, and then the generic font family that it belongs to.

Windows Font, Mac Font, Generic Font

Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
Arial Black, Gadget, sans-serif
Comic Sans MS, cursive
Courier New, Courier, monospace
Georgia, serif
Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif
Lucida Console, Monaco, monospace
Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande, sans-serif
Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif
Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif
Times New Roman, Times, serif
Trebuchet MS, Helvetica, sans-serif
Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif
Symbol
Webdings
Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats
MS Sans Serif, Geneva, sans-serif
MS Serif, New York, serif

That's it. That's all of em. If it's not on that list, you can't use it as text and expect to have it look the same way on your websites. Now, you might look at that list and say "Hey that's a good number of options" in which case you'll make my life easier. Just keep in mind though that when you're talking with Ad Agencies, and Print Designers, they might not know this. They see the minute differences in thousands of fonts, and know what specific font and typographic setting truly gets your brand across. They're great at it, because print designers can use pretty much any font they want. Just be ready to have some nice looking text on some print pages, be reduced to these font styles above and look noticiably different. At least until Microsoft and Apple decide to release a few hundred more common fonts.