BonFX

Typography & Graphic Design Blog

What are the most popular web fonts in the world?

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popular-web-fonts

Update 1/2019: We shut down our tracking stats! Sorry to see it go, but we moved on to other projects!

We are tracking nearly 2000 of the most popular web fonts across 10,000 of the most visited websites ranked by Alexa. Head on over to Fonts of the World to see and explore the data, and click some examples to see what you are missing!

The data is very interesting. Arial has the lions share of usage. Will Arial be the most popular font…forever? And look at how widespread the usage of icon fonts has become: as of today, the fifth most popular web fonts in the world is an icon font.

Most popular web fonts usage trends: coming soon!

We are adding weekly data and trending charts so we can track web font usage over time. It will be fascinating to see what the data reveals as the weeks go by and the data piles up.

Stop by Fonts of the World, and don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter!

Providence SEO: Dominate the Ocean State

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rhode-island-seo

We got involved with local SEO in Rhode Island back in 2004. We moved our freelance graphic design business from Columbus, Ohio, and needed to optimize our website to pick up local clients. Back in those ancient days of the web, it took very little to rank highly in the categories we wanted. Those were they days! Search engines have changed a lot since those halcyon days.

Our Providence SEO adventure

Years later we are still highly ranking for any term we need to for our graphic design blog, BonFX. Our media has sold at the top of it’s category for over 5 years. For instance, google “font combinations” and buy our book 🙂 Our Rhode Island design agencies post is still our most visited local, Rhode Island-optimized post. We have had thousands of visitors to that page, for years. That is not going to change any time soon. It’s safe to say  you need this kind of “web traffic” too.

More leads through website optimization

It’s very simple to get started using the form below or visiting us here, and we now offer this service to you as a part of our expanding web and design business based in Warwick. Our methods are simple, proven, and powerful! You can rank your local RI business, in most cases, very easily if you know what to do. And you need a real Providence SEO to pull it off.

And yes, you really do need the kind of traffic from being in the top 10 of the search engine results (watch our 30 second video: SEO RI).

Well, what do you do? You hire us, and get going to work for you. Our powerful domain software coupled with our exclusive trade methods can get just about any local business in on the first page of Google in a very short period of time. Each client is different, but the method is the same.

Yes, you are interested.

And what is the final question?

Do you have too many clients for your local business?

This is a problem you probably don’t have, right? Our job is to give you that problem, by getting positioning you as highly as possible through our proven methods.

Help us do our job for you!

Talk to us!

So please have a little chat with us. We invite you to look at how the process will work for your site.

 

    Your Name (required - It's not "Buddy")

    Your Email (required - e.g. "iggy@coffeemilk.com"

    What is the top SEO Question burning in your mind? (0ptional - but it's not "Where do I get milk and bread?")

     

     

    The 14 Most Popular Free Sans-Serif Fonts That Are Actually Useful

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    Free fonts can be sourced from innumerable free font websites these days. Most free fonts, however, are of dubious quality and limited practicality. One of our devoted interests is collecting the most useful free fonts for use in our own projects. And so you, our dear reader, get to benefit from our research that we give away free!

    Today we have fourteen of the most popular free sans-serif fonts that meet our criteria for usefulness. Our criteria is very simple, and yet it is very difficult to find free typefaces that meet them. Let’s have a look at the criteria.

    A useful free sans-serif typeface must have these qualities or attributes:

    • It must be good looking
    • It must not have any overly-deviant or idiosyncratic glyphs that limit it’s usefulness
    • Have Normal, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic weights
    • It must be proven to be already popular: this is an important part of the vetting process. In matters like this, the crowd’s opinion matters tremendously

    … [Read More]

    Graphic Design Quote of the Day: Creativity, not Computer Savvy

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    design quote jul 8

    Today it is a challenge for designers to avoid being seduced by technology. As sophisticated as computer applications may be, they  are only tools for the creative mind. Truly successful designs begin with ideas and concepts. As you execute your designs on the computer, your knowledge of typography, combined with your trained eye and aesthetic judgment, will provide the path to the most creative solution.

    -James Craig, Designing With Type

    Hostnine Review – It’s time to give these guys some credit!

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    Hostnine shared hosting review

    It’s time to give a healthy dose of credit where it is due! With so many places to buy shared hosting, reseller hosting, and various VPS services, and with wildly-crazy levels of service and value among the myriad choices, I know it’s helpful to read reviews about web hosting companies from trusted sources. BonFX has been around long enough and has been hosted long enough with the same hosting company to offer a very qualified review. To say the least, Hostnine has been a partner for us and I want to tell you a little about them, and I want you to sign up for them if you need a new web host, reseller or shared, or a cloud VPS.

    … [Read More]

    Where to buy expired domains

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    Where to buy expired domains

    Simple: at our new sister site Oxbow Domains – the expired domain specialist!

    If you need high-quality, no-spam expired domains for your PBN, SEO work, or affiliate sites, please check out Oxbow.

    Logo, Branding, and Design

    We had a blast working on the logo and branding for the site. The logo is a stylized ox bow, and references our crawler software, Ox.

    The website is designed at and hosted by Squarespace, and uses their Pacific template. This is the first time we’ve used Squarespace Commerce and it is really an excellent product. Highly recommended.

    Even if you aren’t on the market for expired domains (yes, it’s a niche market to say the least), do stop by and see how GREAT the design is, and how flexible Squarespace can be.

    Explain in a few words, what are expired domains for?

    Links from quality sites to your main website are the main factor in how Google ranks the quality of your site. If you can’t easily get natural, organic links back to your site, you can create a “network” of websites using domains from sites that themselves had a naturally strong set of links  pointing to them. If you acquire these domains, add new content, and generally make them look like “real” sites again, Google will allow the “link juice” from those reconstituted sites to flow down to your main site. So, if you collect a little set of these “expired domains” and fluff them back up, you can reap the benefit of the hard work of the previous owners, and Google’s ranking method is glad to help your main site that these “network” sites now point to! It’s a simple yet powerful concept that takes advantage of how Google works.

    A book of free wedding font combinations?

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    Free Wedding Font Combinations

    We get a lot of traffic about font combinations because of our typography book, font app, font articles, etc. One of the most popular searches that we don’t have any posts or books on is for “free wedding font combinations”. So this is a shout out to anyone searching for some help on how to put together typography for wedding invitations, professional or otherwise, using only freely-available typefaces. Would you be interested in a book dedicated to this topic? From what we can tell there is a lot of interest, but we aren’t sure if it’s enough to justify a dedicated book. Take a look at The Big Book of Font Combinations to get an idea of what a wedding invitation focused book might look like.

    … [Read More]

    Re-redesign of nbcnews.com gets it right, sort of

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    The widely-panned nbcnews.com website redesign from February 2014 is getting a facelift—after a really bad facelift!

    You read it here first. In my previous article highlighting the flop redesign of nbcnews.com, I excoriated the horrible design misfire and left it at that. In private conversation, I told friends how such a bad user experience was going to impact their reader stats negatively. Well, the numbers are in:

    nbcnews.com redesign

    The nbcnews.com website was already declining when the silly redesign was launched in February. They had a functional site, but the hyper-partisan cheerleading, I mean news reporting, was the real issue behind their decline in the first place. The overly-picturesque giant-comic-book redesign effort, which was an attempt at a branding turnaround, simply hastened the continued decline in visitors because it was simply unreadable as a source of news. Apparently, some Very Smart People™ at nbcnews.com thought mixing partisan news, coloring books, and Flickr, would equal a turnaround in the decline of their viewership. It did not work.

    So how does the new design look, which is available for the moment in a preview opt-in section of the site? In a word, improved:

    nbcnews-redesign

    There are now 17+ story links above the fold, and a full suite of site navigation tools to quickly get you some place else. And if you flip to a mobile device, you get a very-workable no-nonsense sans-comic-book layout and typographic treatment (hidden pun in there, for sharp-readers only).

    The mobile view looks good too:

    nbcnew-redesign-mobile

    Overall, we can see it’s very much a work in progress, but progress in the right direction.

    What about Search? Let’s quote my previous post on this:

    “BTW: Don’t even click “Search” unless YOU ARE READY FOR SOME SERIOUS SEARCHING! WOOHOO!

    You clicked “Search”, didn’t you. You were warned.”

    Hopefully they’ll fix that search box before the real site goes live :).

    In the meantime, if you want a ton of news in a legible format, try Real Clear Politics (for desktop) or the Real Clear Politics app (for mobile). You’ll get a cross-section of headlines from all major news outlet in a cohesive, news-focused UI that knows what it is trying to do.

     

    Redesign of nbcnews.com gives “mobile-first” strategy a black eye

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    Visit nbcnews.com now. The “news” site has 5 headlines. I’m on a Mac with a 1080p display. This is what 5 headlines on a 1080p display looks like:

    news

    This is what happens when someone doesn’t get mobile-first.

    Mobile-first should mean optimizing the content and design starting with mobile, not starting and ending with mobile. I’m looking at a formerly desktop-friendly news site that is 100% unusable on a desktop device.

    This is such a goofy misapplication of mobile-first methodology that it’s goofy.

    Let me just say that I wrote a little piece called 52 Question Checklist for Responsive Web Design Projects that was written to prevent goofy misapplications of mobile-first, or responsive web design, exactly like what we see at nbcnews.com. It annoyed a few people. I wonder if any of those people are on the design team at nbcnews.com?

    Ok, so the world should design websites mobile-first. We get it. It’s right. It’s “how to build websites” now. But someone in charge of nbcnews.com only read the table of contents to “Mobile-First Web Design for Dummies” (is that a real book?), stopped there, not realizing they didn’t get it. This is Windows 8 all over again. Truly mobile paradigms are….mobile! They don’t translate to desktops! Hasn’t anyone on the design team at nbcnews.com been paying attention…to anything?

    Oh well, another day, another deleted bookmark to a formerly relevant or usable site.

    BTW: Don’t even click “Search” unless YOU ARE READY FOR SOME SERIOUS SEARCHING! WOOHOO!

    You clicked “Search”, didn’t you. You were warned.

     

    Font Combinations

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    Here are the three (well, four) best resources for creating classic font combinations that we know of:

    The resource page has pretty much all the classic font combination pages and resources from over the last decade. If you start there, you are going to get all the info you need. There are other more modern sites that focus on examples rather than principles, such as I Font You, but they tend to be a bit random. A book like The Big Book of Font Combinations takes a systematic approach and limits itself to a core subset of the most popular fonts of all time.

    BONUS REFERENCE: You can also find many of the classic fonts, pre-typeset and mixable on the fly in, our iPhone App, Font Combinations 2.0.

    font-combinations