Another aspect of designing your dream website is finding the right fonts. As with colours, this aims for visual beauty in keeping with the spirit of the site, reinforced by names reflecting its purpose.

Having sifted through several thousand fonts (truly), I found myself gravitating again and again to the kinetic energy of script fonts, and among these, two stood out for a website celebrating life: Spirit of Dance by Vera Holera and Wild Pen by Corradine Fonts. Both are strong, singing scripts, and neither has been used 1,000 times on coffee cups and t-shirts.

Like many scripts, they work best for titles or phrases or shorter quotations, with Wild Pen being the more readable of the two for longer excerpts.  So I used Spirit of Dance for page headers and for some short quotations in blog posts, and Wild Pen for others.

For normal text, neither would be easy on the eye, so I use Merriweather as the default serif and Ubuntu as the sans serif.  Both have meaning in their names and are easy to read.  Ubuntu has a particularly powerful meaning, defined by Desmond Tutu below.

The featured image shows how they all look, lined up in a row, each stating the beautiful word ‘nuannaarpoq’ in their own way.

And because the makers among you know that what can’t be seen counts almost as much as what can be seen, you might like to know that my behind-the-scenes working documents on this site use Lucida Bright!

 

Photo credit: Mona Eendra at unsplash.com

 

 

Ubuntu:  ‘The quality of being human and also humane … The person who had ubuntu was known to be compassionate and gentle, who used his strength on behalf of the weak, who did not take advantage of others – in short, he cared, treating others as what they were, human beings… Without this quality a prosperous man, even though he might be a chief, was regarded as someone deserving of pity and sometimes even contempt … If you lacked ubuntu, … you lacked an indispensable ingredient to being human. You might have much of the world’s goods, and you might have position and authority, but if you did not have ubuntu, you did not amount to much.’

Desmond Tutu, The Star, 12 August 1981

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