Archive for January, 2008

Fonts in Web Design

Tired of sticking with Verdana and Arial in web design, I did some research to find out what other options might be possible. For those of you not familiar with font usage in web design, when using html and css, the font specified for text must be available on every viewer’s computer. This means the designer is limited to common fonts that are actually shipped as Windows or Mac system fonts. The css specification would be (font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif). Several fonts can be listed as the browser will go down through the list until it finds an available font. The last one listed is commonly a “font family” so if none of the fonts are found, the browser will use the generic family.

The general common fonts I found did not expand the list dramatically, but it did create some possibilities. I will show them here by name using the font specification in css. The font size on all is 16px. As you can see, some fonts display larger than others. (The display of this list actually depends on fonts found on your computer.)
Arial
Verdana
Trebuchet MS
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Times New Roman
Impact

A font that is common on the Mac, Lucida Grande, can be found as Lucida Sans Unicode in Windows.
Lucida

Two more fonts that are very common, but not a sure thing are:
Geneva
Helvetica

Here is a listing of the typical font families. Again the way they display is dependent on the fonts found on your computer.
sans-serif
serif
cursive
fantasy
monospace
I hope this adds some options to your efforts using css on the web.

Comments are off for this post