Books are, for the most part, black text on a white page. This has been the norm since they started printing things on paper. On a screen, though, you have the ability to play with countless styles and colors that’ll bring personality to your brand as users spend time navigating the site.
If you don’t consider that to be a vital part of your digital marketing strategy, we want to convince you otherwise. Here are five reasons why the colors and fonts on your website matter.
- Readability
Studies have shown that people actually read less accurately on a screen and that they also retain less information when compared to reading on a page. So in an age where websites can disappear with a quick click of the cursor, making sure that your page is readable is absolutely vital to keeping people engaged.
This means that you’ll need to keep an eye out for text size and contrast between text and background color. It also means keeping away from fonts that are pretty, but difficult to parse. You have a lot to offer — don’t let that go to waste because your visitors couldn’t read your homepage.
- Style
Your color and font choices are a core component in the style of your website. You might not think that pairing two fonts will be very noticeable, but open up a document and write a header in Luminari and a body text in Helvetica. It’s not a remarkable duo, but you might be surprised that you actually have an opinion about it.
If you’ve ever done house painting, you know what it feels like to spend time leafing through paint samples, comparing color after color until you find the right fit. And once you get that Pantone 304 C up on the wall, you may be astounded by the complete shift in energy it brings to the room.
Or you might hate it. What matters is that you noticed it — and thankfully, the process of changing a color on your website is much more painless!
- Format
Your font choice can actually be used to make information easier to read and process. You’ve probably seen it before on other websites. People will use different colors and fonts to differentiate between their titles and the body of their copy. This isn’t a stroke of luck; it’s the work of marketers and designers using text shape and hue to tell you what to look at and in what order.
It’s like a magician doing a card trick. All it takes is a few sly moves, and you can guide a user on your website down a path of your own creation.
- Message
Fonts say things — even the fonts that look alike at first. The human eye can take even the smallest shift in the curve of a letter and actually feel something about it subconsciously. It doesn’t matter whether you have a professional image that requires a sleek sans-serif or something a little more playful. When you pick a font for your brand, it’s going to leave an impression.
Colors are the same way. We’ve studied the psychology behind colors for a long, long time, along with the emotions they invoke. Red is passionate, yellow is cheerful, and purple and black are colors associated with power and elegance. A color isn’t a color, just as a font isn’t a font. It’s a statement.
- Recognition
If nothing else, the font and color you pick will be the things that stick the longest in your patrons’ minds. Aesthetic is a powerful part of brand recognition. Even if you haven’t seen the movies, you can probably recognize the infamous font of the Star Wars opening text crawl. And if you walk into a building that’s been repurposed with little construction, it wouldn’t be hard to tell whether the place used to be a Taco Bell.
The goal is to get people to engage with your brand and business based on what you have to offer. But to get there, you have to nail that first impression, that initial smile and handshake that says more than we’d like to admit.
And with the right font and colors incorporated into your website’s design, you can give your clients a positive association that might leave them wanting more.
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