15 Of The Most Used Web Safe Fonts
The term “Web Safe Fonts” basically means there is a good chance a large percentage of users should have a particular font available on their machine. While this term might seem reassuring to some, it also means that a percentage of users might not have that font available.
Whilst coding your Cascading Stylesheets you should use a fall back font just in case a user doesn’t have the font available, for example: “font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, sans-serif;”
CSS3 uses fonts differently with @font-face, which is a superb addition, you can read more about @font-face here: http://www.css3.info/preview/web-fonts-with-font-face/
No font is truly “Web Safe” but some are safer than others, here I have listed 15 fonts that have a good coverage and many users will have installed.
Arial
Bookman Old Style
Century Gothic
Copperplate
Courier
Courier New
Garamond
Georgia
Gill Sans
Impact
Lucida Sans
Palatinto Linotype
Tahoma
Trebuchet
Verdana
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November 29, 2009
What about the ever popular Helvetica? It is very similar to Arial, but I find that I like seeing Helvetica when I’m on my macbook. It may be, that Arial and Helvetica are exactly the same, but I perceive Helvetica as a cleaner, thinner, nicer font for some reason. Only when using it in my own design of course. If you asked me to distinguish between Arial and Helvetica on a site that I wasn’t familiar with, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t be able to.
November 29, 2009
I didn’t include Helvetica in the list as its not installed on as many machines as Arial.
But… I prefer Helvetica myself