If You Want A Retro Style Website You Need Older Versions Of Fonts

Retro styling is not limited to fashion and music; in recent years, quite a few websites have warmed up to the idea of replicating the pure HTML experience of the 1990s, a time when "surfing the World Wide Web" was coming of age. Early websites had two major looks: Default text on white backgrounds or layouts based on the look of the Microsoft Windows operating system. A few years later, there was a explosion of graphic elements and colors with the arrival of AngelFire and GeoCities.

Replicating the look of 1990s web design is pretty easy to accomplish from scratch; however, it is even easier to look for WordPress themes and GitHub CSS files and libraries that provide everything you need to inject the right amount of nostalgia into your retro projects. The only thing missing from these handy templates is the true look of the fonts from that era. Times New Roman from modern operating systems does not look the same as it did on Windows 95; the same can be said about old macOS fonts such as Chicago, and the difference can be found in terms of anti-aliasing.

The graphical servers and font rendering options in use today automatically inject anti-aliasing for the smoothest reading experiences; while this is certainly great, it does not pay faithful homage to the way the web looked in the 1990s. For the ultimate in font nostalgia, there are a couple of options, but they are not as simple as CSS because anti-aliasing is pretty much built into modern operating systems and browsers.

The open-source font editing platform known as FontForge is the most sensible approach, but this also requires going through the entire set and converting each character to retro versions. This is a very manual process that a few dedicated web designers and typography fanatics have been undertaking, and you can already search for these fonts, which are free to use. These brave font editors have already come up with ways of automating the raster process, and you can see the amazing results at VistaServ, a community focused on recreating the nostalgic vibe of browsing the web in the 1990s. For more information click here https://vistaserv.net/blog/90s-fonts-modern-browsers.