Using Sans-Serif Fonts

Owned by Karen Park
Last updated: Mar 08, 2016 by Brenden, Kate

Overview

Serifs are the small decorative extensions on the ends of some letters in a font. A sans-serif font does not have them, making it cleaner, crisper, and easier to read on lower resolution screens and devices.  Try to avoid a dark backgrounds with dark text as it can be difficult to read and make sure you include white space and headers in your documents rather than creating a large block of text.

Table of Contents

Examples of Serif and Sans-Serif Fonts

The following are examples of serif fonts. These fonts should not be used.

  • Times New Roman
  • Cambria
  • Rockwell

The following are examples of sans-serif fonts, which should be used to maximize accessibility. 

  • Verdana

  • Arial

  • Tahoma

Change the font in Contribute

  1. In your draft, select Format > Font.

  2. Select the font list that you would like to use.
    1. The list will have multiple fonts in it, what this means is that it will try and use the first one in the list but if it can't it will move to the next listed font.

Change the font in Dreamweaver

  1. Click the drop down arrow for the Font-family field.
  2. Select the list of fonts that you would like to use.
    1. The list will have multiple fonts in it, what this means is that it will try and use the first one in the list but if it can't it will move to the next listed font.

Change the font of a webpage with HTML

  1. Use this string of code without the quotation marks:
    1. "<span style="font-family: font that you want to use, for example: verdana;font-size: medium;">text that you want in this specific font</span>"