Fonts
There are 2 types of fonts that can be used on templates: Web Safe Fonts and Web Fonts.
Web Safe Fonts
Web Safe Fonts are a very small collection of fonts that are available on all devices. If you use a web safe font for your templates you can ensure that the font can be displayed exactly the same on all devices and clients.
Here is the list of web safe fonts:
Arial
Verdana
Times New Roman
Courier New
Georgia
Comic Sans MS
Trebuchet MS
Impact
Helvetica
Tahoma
The problem with web safe fonts, however, is that the selection of fonts is only limited to the above, making it almost impossible to create distinguished designs.
Web Fonts
Web Fonts are a technology that allow embedded fonts in your designs that may not be installed on everyone's devices. By using a web font you can choose one of tens of thousands of fonts that have been created to come up with distinguished and stellar looking designs.
The problem with Web Fonts is that rendering them is only supported on roughly 20% of email clients.
Websites
Socials
100% (Socials are pre-rendered by Rechat)
100% (Socials are pre-rendered by Rechat)
Emails
As you can see in the table above using a web font is OK pretty much on all mediums except for emails. If you use a web font, on most email clients, the web font is going to be ignored. That means you will use a font during your design process, but when the font lands on inboxes of your clients it's gonna be rendered differently.
This is not a limitation imposed by Rechat. Any program you use to send emails from will have a similar situation.
Fancy Fonts
A smart way of getting around the limitation of web fonts in emails is saving pieces of text as images (Using your desired web font) and embedding them into your email. This would make your email look identical across email clients using your desired web font.
At Rechat we have embedded this technique into our email platform using the Fancy Font emails blocks. This makes it very easy to type in any text into Rechat using your desired font and Rechat will take care of converting it into an email so it looks stellar on all platforms.
Also note that during your template design process we can make your templates use fancy fonts automatically.
However, using this technique comes of with some trade offs:
The emails will be slower to load.
The emails won't be selectable or searchable and less accessible.
The text-to-image ratio of the email will drop, which can contribute to the email landing in spam.
Therefore, our suggestion is using Fancy Font's for things like headers, but using a web safe font for the larger pieces of text and body sections of your emails.
Last updated