- birdland
It's well understood that the state of type on the web is lacking, if not downright shameful. While interesting solutions like sIFR have emerged in recent years, developers who just want to stick to the basics of browser generated type are still faced with a limited set of fonts that are guaranteed to be installed on most users' machines. I'd like to start a list of accepted web fonts that we can all refer to when starting a new project. It would be great if everyone who visits this forum could add to the list and explain why they think "font A" is a safe choice to use ubiquitously, or why "font D" doesn't look good at small sizes. Please feel free to share any successes or frustrations you've encountered while deploying type on your sites. Any information you want to provide will be welcome. For instance, do you prefer serifed or sans-serifed faces? What method do you use to set type size? Pixels? Points? Keywords? Percents? Ems? Let us hear it!
Finally, does anyone use siFR on the ASU web? If so, please share your experiences with its rendering capabilities across browsers. Have your users noticed or commented on the beautiful fonts you've been able to serve them with it? What about page loading time?
Web-Safe Fonts
- Times New Roman (serif, all systems)
- Georgia (serif, all systems)
- Arial (sans-serif, all systems)
- Verdana (sans-serif, all systems)
- Helvetica (sans-serif, all systems)
- Courier (monospace, all systems)
- Trebuchet MS?
- Lucida Grande (sans-serif, all Mac OS)
- Lucida Sans Unicode (monospace, all Mac OS)
- Helvetica Neue (sans-serif, Mac OSX)
- Candara, Cambria, Consolas, Calibri, Constantina, Corbel (Windows Vista)
More Selective Fonts
- Palatino
- Bitstream Vera Sans
- Bitstream Vera Serif
- Frutiger
- Monaco
- Geneva
- Andale Mono
- New Century Schoolbook
- Century Gothic
- Utopia
Resources
- "Web Typography Sucks" - Podcast of a SXSW 2007 panel on many aspects of type on the web. Everything from proper use of quotes/primes and en-dashes/em-dashes to font faces and grid alignment.
- "An Open Letter to John Warnock" - Andrei Herasimchuck proposes that Adobe release a few core fonts into the public domain for free use on the web.
sIFR seems like a heavy page load, especially for any page with any other loading things. But it is exciting to play with.
My favorite typography book (the one I had weekly tests on from Mr. Sanft in College of Design) is the elements of typographic style by Robert Bringhurst. And there is a lovely site that translates these ideas for the web:
http://webtypography.net/
I've been trying to learn em use.
I love me some arial headers, verdana body. I've been toying with letter-spacing. I'm not happy yet with the increments available with letter-spacing.
Anybody want to see the lowercase a I drew with my own two hands? Blood sweat and tears, I'm telling you.Â