Hello everybody,
Michael here, and today’s lesson will explore working with fonts in CSS.
Choosing the right font, just like choosing the right colors, is an important element in website styling. For our exploration of CSS fonts, let’s take a look at the form we styled in CSS Lesson 1: Introduction to CSS Styling. Here’s the form’s HTML code along with the screenshot of the form (keep in mind that this form code isn’t connected to a CSS file):
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="es-US" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Flight finder:</h1>
<form action="Submitted.html" method="POST">
<label for="datepicker1">Pick the date you want to depart for your vacation</label><br>
<input type="date" id="datepicker1" name="datepicker1" min="2021-03-25" max="2022-03-25"><br>
<br>
<label for="datepicker2">Pick the date you want to return from your vacation</label><br>
<input type="date" id="datepicker2" name="datepicker2" min="2021-03-25" max="2022-03-25"><br>
<br>
<label for="time1">What time would you like to depart? (flights shown within 90 minutes of selected time)</label><br>
<input type="time" id="time1" name="time1"><br>
<br>
<label for="time2">What time would you like to return? (flights shown within 90 minutes of selected time)</label><br>
<input type="time" id="time2" name="time2"><br>
<br>
<label for="layover">How many layovers do you want?</label><br>
<input type="number" id="layover" name="layover" min="0" max="3"><br>
<br>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
<div class="container">
<p>Thank you for booking your next trip with XYZ Airlines!!</p>
<p>Can't wait to see you on your travels!!</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
OK, so now that we know what the unstyled version of the form looks like, let’s start having some fun with (CSS) fonts. Just as we did for the previous CSS lesson, I’d suggest creating a new CSS file and giving it the same name as your HTML file-in this case, I’ll call the CSS file Form.css since my HTML file is called Form.html.
Before we start examining how to work with fonts in CSS, let’s familiarize ourselves with the concept of font families. CSS has five different font families, which are categories of fonts with their own distinct features; here are the five different font families:
- Serif-these fonts have a small stroke at the edge of each letter (example: Times New Roman-the font I’m using for this blog)
- Sans-serif-these fonts have no small strokes at the edge of each letter (example: Arial)
- Monospace-these fonts have letters of equal width (example: Courier New)
- Cursive-these fonts are meant to look like human handwriting, namely cursive handwriting-remember learning that in school? (e.g. Comic Sans)
- Fantasy-these fonts are meant to be decorative (e.g. Papyrus)
For those of you who’d like a visual depiction of the five CSS font families, refer to the picture below:
Now that we discussed the five CSS font families, let’s see how we can apply font stylings to our webpage. Let’s start the font styling by first changing the font of the top header (Flight finder:)
h1{
color: green;
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
text-align: center
}
To style the top header, I applied a series of CSS styling calls to the <h1> tag, as it contained the Flight finder: header. Aside from changing the font of the <h1> tag, I also changed the tag’s color and center-aligned the text. Take a look at the series of CSS styling calls I applied to the <h1> tag. Which styling call do you think changes the font? If you thought it was the styling call with the font-family property, you’d be right. In order to change the font of a certain element, you’d need to make this styling call: font-family: "[font you'd like to use]". Yes, you would need to wrap the name of the font you’d like to use inside double quotes as I did for the font name I used in this example.
- When deciding on font stylings for your webpage, Comic Sans is the last font I’d use if I was designing a webpage for a business since Comic Sans is generally seen as unprofessional. However, if you’re just designing a webpage to follow along with my tutorial, let your imagination run wild with the font stylings!
Now, what if you wanted to change the font size of the <h1> tag? Take a look at this series of styling calls below:
h1{
color: green;
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
font-size: 40px;
text-align: center
}
In this example, I used the font-size property to change the font size of the <h1> tag to 40px (40 pixels). Whenever specifying a font size, always follow this syntax-font size + px. Don’t forget to put the px after the number!
Now, let’s change the font of the last two lines of text on this page. Here’s how to do so (in this example, we’ll change the font to Century Gothic):
.container{
color: red;
font-family: "Century Gothic";
font-size: 30px;
text-align: center
}
In this example, note that I kept the same font styling for <h1> that I had applied in the previous example. Aside from that, pay attention to the code above that I used to change the styling for the last two lines. Recall that from my previous CSS lesson (CSS Lesson 1: Introduction to CSS Styling) that the dot (.) is used as one of the main selectors in CSS; selectors tell CSS to select a certain element to style. In this example, the dot selector tells CSS to style all elements within a container class-if you take a look at the form code that I shared at the beginning of this post, you’ll notice that the last two lines of the webpage are contained in a <div> tag with the class container. Thus, when I applied the series of CSS styling calls to the container class, the stylings were applied to the last two lines of text on this webpage.
As for the stylings I applied, I simply made the text red and center-aligned along with using a size 30 Century Gothic font.
Now, let’s say instead of using common CSS fonts (e.g. Arial, Times New Roman), you wanted to get a little creative with your CSS styling. In this example, let’s say you wanted to pull a font from somewhere else-we’ll use a font from the Google Fonts API (here’s the link to the API, which contains a catalog of thousands of fonts-https://fonts.google.com/).
Here’s the homepage of the Google Fonts API:
If you scroll down further on the page, you can see thousands of freely-available fonts for your website’s use.
- In case you’re wondering why you see the sentence
This is the year 2022several times on the homepage, it’s because in the box to the right of the font size slider (currently set to 40px), you can type in a word or phrase and see what that word/phrase looks like in hundreds of different fonts.This is the year 2022happened to be my test phrase.
For this example, let’s change the font of the elements in the container class (the last two lines of text on this webpage) to Press Start 2P-which you can find on the Google Fonts API.
Here’s the Press Start 2P font on the Google Fonts API-I like the font’s retro gaming aesthetic:
Now, how do we get this font onto our CSS styling and in turn, onto the webpage? Take a look at the line in red in the form’s HTML code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="es-US" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="Form.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Press+Start+2P">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Flight finder:</h1>
<form action="Submitted.html" method="POST">
<label for="datepicker1">Pick the date you want to depart for your vacation</label><br>
<input type="date" id="datepicker1" name="datepicker1" min="2021-03-25" max="2022-03-25"><br>
<br>
<label for="datepicker2">Pick the date you want to return from your vacation</label><br>
<input type="date" id="datepicker2" name="datepicker2" min="2021-03-25" max="2022-03-25"><br>
<br>
<label for="time1">What time would you like to depart? (flights shown within 90 minutes of selected time)</label><br>
<input type="time" id="time1" name="time1"><br>
<br>
<label for="time2">What time would you like to return? (flights shown within 90 minutes of selected time)</label><br>
<input type="time" id="time2" name="time2"><br>
<br>
<label for="layover">How many layovers do you want?</label><br>
<input type="number" id="layover" name="layover" min="0" max="3"><br>
<br>
<input type="submit" value="Submit">
</form>
<div class="container">
<p>Thank you for booking your next trip with XYZ Airlines!!</p>
<p>Can't wait to see you on your travels!!</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>Also take a look at the line in red in the form’s CSS code:
h1{
color: green;
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
font-size: 40px;
text-align: center
}
.container{
color: red;
font-family: "Press Start 2P";
font-size: 30px;
text-align: center
}See, I can declare Press Start 2P in the font-family property of the .container styling calls just fine. However, since Press Start 2P is not a standard HTML font, setting this font as the value of the font-family property alone won’t change the font.
- Standard HTML fonts refer to fonts that you can find pre-installed onto a standard edition of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel.
That’s where the red-highlighted line in the form’s HTML code comes in. If you’re not using a standard HTML font on your webpage, you’d need to create another <link> tag that links to the font’s URL on the Google Fonts API (or any fonts API you might use for that matter). The link’s rel would still be stylesheet, but the href would be the font’s URL on the API.
Let’s take a look and see what the webpage looks like with the Press Start 2P font:
Pretty neat, right? Recall that I kept the green, center-aligned Comic Sans font for the top header on the webpage, so that’s why the style looks the same.
Thanks for reading,
Michael
