G'day.

Is there a list somewhere of suitable fonts for first and second preference?

Regards,
Laurie.

Laurie -- that's the $64,000 question ... we all have our own "preferences", but do a search for "website suitable fonts"; that might help your decision.

TA only 64k you're being nice.

Laurie, I researched this a while back and came up with the following top four;
Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Verdana, though not the most elegant is the easiest to read.

Suggest using sans-serif as the final choice as this is the most common default style.

Jody

CE -- knew you'd answer me; even though I have a small wallet ... ... yep; Verdana is the most common -- CE; check your PM.

Verdana font is great, Helvetica and Georgia are nice too.  Georgia is not especially nice for the web, I just think it looks nice.

travelagent wrote:

CE -- knew you'd answer me; even though I have a small wallet ... ... yep; Verdana is the most common -- CE; check your PM.

I had to take a phone call and before I got back you had already beaten me to a reply

Thanks

Thanks to you all.

I've also done some reserch and after much reading and skimming came up with this page which seems to hold the $64,000 answere: http://webmonkey.com/webmonkey/01/45/in … ?tw=design

From this I developed my own list, much like CE's: verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif

With thanks,
Laurie.

Mutilated1 wrote:

Verdana font is great, Helvetica and Georgia are nice too.  Georgia is not especially nice for the web, I just think it looks nice.

That makes 2 of us!

Now I mentioned this just the other day in another thread...

Well, thanks for that Matte. Must have been one of the threads that I didn't read. I've had a look, but couldn't find it.

Would you agree that the current competition has thrown the forum into confusion?

Regards,
Laurie.

take a look at cnn.com bbc.co.uk yahoo.com aol.com and see which fonts they're using. they're some of the biggest sites out there and will have researched this stuff before going live with it.

yes, the competition is responsible for a lot of junk being posted. imho

ColoEagle wrote:

Verdana, though not the most elegant is the easiest to read.

You can make it slightly more attractive and easier to read by slightly reducing the contrast between background and text colours.

for example, dark grey on white, dark blue on white

actually colours from #000099 #0000FF on white have been researched to be the easiest to read........

mobtex wrote:

yes, the competition is responsible for a lot of junk being posted. imho

I agree.


I would say Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica, Courier, Times, and Verdana are the most common fonts used on the web.

When I design, I choose one of those (Usually my CSS has font-family: Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica as I like Tahoma personally).

laurie_m wrote:

Would you agree that the current competition has thrown the forum into confusion?

I'll mention no names, but yes!

My old man's a printer by trade.
He's not an actual printer NOW, he invents printing products, moves them to production and sells them globally to some of the biggest print production companies in the world........................yada yada.

Anyway, we've had this font conversation a few times since I started building sites.

His tuppenys worth:

Verdana on screen looks clean and professional, Verdana on paper looks cheap and nasty.
Ariel on paper looks clean and professional, Ariel on screen looks cheap and nasty.
Comic sans on screen AND on paper just looks awful, I hate that %^(($$% font!!
All other fonts are for corporate logos, not text.

His words, my order.
Because he made his last employer over £30m in 4 years, I listen to this.
Everything else he spouts is nonsense, but he knows his print!

I only ever use verdana as the primary. obviously, I use a font family: verdana, tahoma, Ariel

Well you can use Verdana as your on screen font, but use CSS to change the print font to Arial. That way you're old man is happy

My favorite font to use with HTML is verdana, the smaller the better.

I've been using Eurostile in Photoshop alot lately. And Haettenschweiler looks cool if you bump the width of the font out to about 120%.

Type has always been one of my weak design points, but I think i'm getting better with it.

Jason

DiskFaktory wrote:

My favorite font to use with HTML is verdana, the smaller the better.

I hope you provide accessibility options for those with poor sight

and to everyone.....

True, verdana doesn't look great when it's big - so when someone sets their browser to display the fonts larger,
how does your site look?
Do you over ride the browser's behaviour?
Do you provide alternative stylesheets for visually impaired readers?

So here's my idea - for each size find a font that looks good at that size; then use these different fonts in your different styleshhets........

http://psychology.wichita.edu/optimalweb/text.htm
From the page: "Significant differences in reading time were found  in that   Times New Roman and Arial were read faster than Courier New, Century Schoolbook, and Georgia. Fonts at the 10-point size were read more slowly than fonts at the 12-point"

Funnily enough, was reading about this earlier in yet another Christmas "Web Design/Building" book. Like me they like Verdana!