SharePoint Knowledge Base

As a SharePoint consultant we often work to create public facing sites and of course even intranets that have a standardized corporate look and feel. The elements that achieve this are typically boiled down to colors and fonts. A second post will deal with web safe colors and their evolution over the years from the original Netscape 256 color palette (and yes each color has a name), to what is now possible using fonts.

Shown below was the conventional set of what's called web safe fonts. These are fonts that can be expected to be on any machine that is using the website. Here is the essential thing to understand - a website that describes its font doesn't declare exactly what it is and what renders on the client machine is dependent on the device. So if you say Arial bold, and it's an iPad device browsing it may render as Helvetica bold. The client machine matches it as close as it can. There is a family of fonts that are routinely substituted for any that are described in a webpage.

Newer techniques are to actually push the font to the client machine and it gives a great deal more flexibility.

As SharePoint partners, we love to help so feel free to contact us!

Mention this post and we'll send you a white paper on all of the ways we can help you make your website or intranet look sharp!