What Fonts Are Websafe in 2009?

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread?t=600738

by rams • 17 years ago

51 18 17 years ago

geuis• 17 years ago

Pretty good discussion. Thanks for posting this.

mtarnovan• 17 years ago

Interesting read. Regarding Lucida Grande, read here more: http://www.brownbatterystudios.com/sixthings/2007/03/14/luci...

CalmQuiet2• 17 years ago

Great workaround Windows' Lucida issues.

alecco• 17 years ago

It's over http://www.brownbatterystudios.com/sixthings/2009/02/18/luci... .

CalmQuiet2• 17 years ago

Great news about improving probabilities of replacing tired standards like Times New Roman and Helvetica.

Hope they're right about this generalizing to the general population from their "heavily designer-weighted" samples.

jpendry• 17 years ago

awsome.

GHFigs• 17 years ago

It should be noted that putting Helvetica after Arial in your stylesheet is self-defeating if your aim is to display Helvetica on Macs but Arial on Windows. Macs ship with Arial, so such declarations mean Helvetica will never be used.

sc• 17 years ago

Historically, Arial rendered better on Windows than Helvetica, so to offer Macs a form of Helvetica over Arial, you'll generally see:

  font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;

hboon• 17 years ago

Yes, and GHFigs is pointing out that the article said:

  font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

which is self-defeating.

pxlpshr• 17 years ago

Of the new fonts they recommend, I actually really like Calibri which is included in Vista, Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac.

I wouldn't rely on it solely as the safe assumption is only ~40% +/- 10 of your audience has it, but hopefully in time it will be a nice alternative. Not really a fan of Tahoma, too condensed for the screen in many cases.

Calibri is always described as a 'humanist' font, which I think makes it the kind of font you'd be pleased to take home to meet mother.

lol

tel• 17 years ago

The whole suite of Vista fonts is actually very, very good.

Which surprises me pretty much daily.

Zev• 17 years ago

Microsoft hired Lucas de Groot to make the C fonts. de Groot's fonts are some of my favorite fonts (Thesis and C fonts are both stunning families)

RossM2• 17 years ago

I'm also a fan of Segoe UI, which (as far as I can tell) is actually used in the Vista dialogs more frequently than Calibri.

Unfortunately Calibri doesn't look great when it's used in small sizes so I tend to use Segoe as a small-size alternative.

jballanc• 17 years ago

Good discussion, but I cannot wait for the day when this is no longer an issue: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

The @font-face property really needs to find its way into more browsers (IE, I'm looking at you!)...

halo• 17 years ago

Erm, the font-face property was originally a proprietary IE property and Microsoft have supported it since IE4, the snag being you need to convert fonts to OTF format to use them.

anatoli• 17 years ago

Aside from Lucida Grande and Palatino Linotype which everyone already knows about, this list is unbelievably unreliable... perhaps based on their limited sample it would work, but not for any major site that gets visited by other users than just designers.

alabut• 17 years ago

A more in-depth article with a matrix of available font types:

http://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-m...

RossM2• 17 years ago

I was rather surprised to see Georgia missing, however I don't know about it's availability on the Mac.

I actually think Myriad Pro is becoming a web-safe font if your primary audience is designers - it's shipped with Photoshop after all.

What Fonts Are Websafe in 2009?

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