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Design Web Typography Basic Web Typography Weights and Styles

Font-style properties

I'm unclear as to when a particular value of 'font-style' should be applied to a font. For instance, why would a font style of italic be applied to a font that is designed to be italic. Why couldn't the font style property be left to normal?

2 Answers

Generally speaking bold and italic texts are used to add emphasis and draw attention to certain lines of text or words. Readers/site visitors will notice bold or italic text before anything else. One thing to keep in mind is you NEVER want to "fake" an italic or bold font by using CSS. Doing this will create an unattractive and "unbalanced" look to the text. Instead, choose fonts that already have a bold or italic option. Hope this helps.

Emmanuel Molina
Emmanuel Molina
9,268 Points

If your font is an italic version and you call it "normal" it will work but it will be strange to apply "font-style: normal;" each time you want to put a word in italic :) It's like calling a class "blue" to put your words in red, that will work but.... :D And if your font as already a "normal" version declared it will override it.