I’ve talked about the importance of buying your own fonts here and here and recently, I was giving a someone the advice to go for a more unique (and most likely) paid font over the popular free Lobster font she’d been using. She responded back to me that she had been looking at some new fonts (yay!), but was confused about whether she needed to buy the web font version or desktop font version. With the the options that myfonts.com gives you, it does seem a bit overwhelming but I promise you it’s not!
The difference between desktop fonts and web fonts is fairly simple.
WEB FONTS:
Web fonts are fonts that are uploaded to your website and are used exclusively on your site.You upload these directly to your site and are able to use them with CSS code. That’s the only thing you can do with web fonts, there is no other use for these web font files. Since I’m not a web designer, I can’t give the details on how exactly to load these onto your site, but Zoe Rooney has an excellent tutorial on her site for you!
OTHER FONTS THAT CAN BE USED ON YOUR SITE:
These work a little differently and may already be installed to your site with certain WordPress themes.
Google Fonts
Adobe Typekit Fonts (available free with a creative cloud subscription)
DESKTOP FONTS:
Desktop fonts are for everything else! You can use them on any program that uses fonts on your computer (Word, Pages, Photoshop, etc). If you use Canva for Work or PicMonkey, they even allow you to upload your own fonts now! You would use the desktop font for this as well.
SO, WHAT DO YOU NEED TO BUY?
If the only place on your site you’re using a particular font will be within graphics you’ve created and uploaded (ie: jpegs/pngs you’ve created in Photoshop, PicMonkey or Canva), then desktop only is fine. If you’re wanting it to be live text on your site (text that you can highlight/copy/paste and also helps with your SEO), then you would want to also have the web font installed on your site. On myfonts.com (a site I highly recommend for high quality fonts), you can purchase the webfont and desktop font together it gives you a 50% discount on second one! So, if you think you might want both make sure to get them at the same time.
See not too hard, right?
Still confused about which font type to buy?
Ask away in the comments, I’m happy to help!
