- From your inbox, click on "Options" and select "Settings".
- Select "Compose" on the left, and scroll until you see "Default Font and Color" (under "Rich Text / HTML"). AOL Mail's defaults are 10 points Arial and black text:
- Optionally pick another font family from the dropdown: AOL currently includes "Arial", "Comic Sans MS", "Courier New", "Georgia", "Impact", "Tahoma", "Times New Roman", "Verdana", or "Wingdings" - the choice is limited to "web safe fonts" to avoid compatibility issues. • Though somewhat unoriginal, you can't go wrong with Arial or Verdana. Arial is the narrowest of these fonts (more words per line), and Verdana was specifically created by Microsoft in 1996 to be a highly legible on-screen font, even at smaller text sizes (most other fonts came from print).
• Avoid the fun-loving Comic Sans MS or overconfident Impact for professional emails.
• Times New Roman , Georgia, and Tahoma don't anti-alias well on older systems (will look jagged).
• Courier New is a monospaced font, not ideally suited for common communication.
• Wingdings is the first of a series of dingbat fonts (symbols), now ubiquitous: its alphabet. - Optionally change the font size: 8 points will look very small on large screen resolutions and for older email recipients; anything above 12 points will look obnoxiously large.
- Click on the eyedropper tool to select one of 70 colors: click on the swatch you like to change default text color, keeping in mind that it should offer a high enough contrast to be easily legible to recipients, especially if you use a stationery (i.e., non-white message background).
Tip: when composing messages, use the formatting toolbar to override default fonts/colors.
Tip # 2: if you have setup an email signature, consider making it match your new defaults. - Scroll all the way down and click "Save Settings" to apply the change.
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