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I am developing a static website which has to look professional.

I found a font (Quicksand) that looks good as a short introductory kind of message / slogan that goes just under the header on the front page.

For the rest of the front page where I detail the services provided and all that jazz, I'd rather use some other less fancy sans like helvetica or verdana. Is it ever okay, from a web design standpoint, to mix two fonts or does it look amateurish?

Otherwise, if I consider using it in the whole site, do you think Quicksand looks good and is legible enough for walls of text with several paragraphs?

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    Quicksand is good for titles and slogans. Don't use it for articles, since users' eyes aren't accustomed to such geometric fonts. You could use such font to write a children's book with four big sentences at each page, but not when publishing an academic paper. Mixing fonts is very common, especially serif fonts with sans-serif fonts. You want to alternate the font you're using and the degree in which you're using a certain type of font to for make things stand out. If you want to go into detail then get some books on typography.
    – mechanicious
    Dec 27, 2015 at 1:04
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    Yes, it i OK to use different font styles.
    – DA01
    Dec 27, 2015 at 1:25
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    See these related posts: Considerations when using multiple font faces and When are typefaces considered conflicting with each other?
    – Zach Saucier
    Dec 27, 2015 at 2:28

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It's perfectly reasonable to use two fonts on a site, especially when your plan is to use one of the fonts as a heading. I wouldn't use the font Quicksand (or really any font that I'd use as a title), as the font for paragraphs. Often they lack legibility and/or just don't look right.

So there's no problem generally with using two fonts on a website, but after two, I'd really start to weigh up the pros and cons of using multiple. Using too many can start to clutter the page and ruin any typographic hierarchy (see here) you have have begun to establish.

Have fun :)

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  • Another issue to watch out for would be the performance hit for the browsers requesting font files. More fonts, more of a performance hit. Slow page loads will drive away users faster than anything.
    – bemdesign
    Dec 30, 2015 at 4:10

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