web safe fonts
As web designers we get into the funk of using the same fonts over and over and over. For the longest time I used Georgia as my serif font, and Verdana as my sans-serif font. Lately, my favorite fonts have been Trebuchet MS (as you can see all over this site) for my serif, and Tahoma for my sans-serif. I find Trebuchet great because not only is it installed on most computers, it looks good too. I’ve been noticing Trebuchet showing up all over the place. Obviously I didn’t start the trend, nor do I mind being a part of it, but it would be nice to use some different fonts.
As web designers we get pretty lazy when it comes to our fonts. I’m not sure why, typography on the web is very important because text is still the number one way of conveying your message. We have font-families at our disposal, and most of us use them even if our first font listed is a fail safe font.
With a little bit of homework we can come up with some font-families that will work cross-browser and cross-platform. There are even font tables created by others ready for our use to pair up some fonts. Futura is one of my favorite fonts, but it isn’t a default Microsoft font. But you can always pair it up with something like Franklin Gothic Medium and then throw in Tahoma, and finally the generic sans-serif. If for some reason you wanted a scripty font like Apple Chancery as your font (I’m not sure why - maybe for your header) you could use Trebuchet and italics for your second font that will run on Windows.
We have options, we may have to change the way we think a bit, but that’s kind of the nature of the beast. The internet is always changing.
Tags: safe fonts, web design, web fonts
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:15 pm and is filed under the internets, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.