New Media Studio. Web design Sunshine Coast

Website Typography

You’ve written your copy, jammed it with keywords to appease the Google gods, formatted it in your favourite font and sent it off to your web designer only to be told ‘We can’t use that font. Your choices are Ariel, Verdana or Times Roman! ’ What’s going on?

Is your web designer out to spoil your day? Probably not. (unless you sent your text formatted in Comic Sans'', the enemy of all good taste and design).

The fonts you use on a web page must be already installed on the computer viewing the website. This can limit you to the likes of Arial, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana, as you can be pretty sure these fonts are installed on just about all computers viewing your site, Mac or PC, old or new. There is some light at the end of the tunnel though and it’s called font stacks.

This is a list the fonts to be used to display the page and the first font from the list found is used. For example, in our font stack, or list below, our first choice of font is Frutiger. If Frutiger isn’t found, we look for Univers and so on until a font is found to display the web page.
font-family: Frutiger, Univers, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif;

Font lists (stacks) commonly used over the past 10 years have been;

• Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
• Courier New, Courier, monospace
• Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
• Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

With time, the likes of Microsoft, Mac and Adobe have developed fonts that are much easier to read on screen and many of these fonts are distributed in new releases of Microsoft Office, Mac OSX and Windows XP and Vista. We now have more choice of fonts beyond Arial, Verdana and Times Roman
Below are some very good alternative font list suggested over at SitePoint. Choose one of these and you are giving yourself the best chance of your website text displaying clearly and consistently as possible. And your web designer will thanks you for it!

Alternative Font Stacks


Website Typography
font-family: Cambria, "Hoefler Text", Utopia, "Liberation Serif", "Nimbus Roman No9 L Regular", Times, "Times New Roman", serif;


Website Typography

font-family: Constantia, "Lucida Bright", Lucidabright, "Lucida Serif", Lucida, "DejaVu Serif", "Bitstream Vera Serif", "Liberation Serif", Georgia, serif;

Website Typography

font-family: "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, Palladio, "URW Palladio L", "Book Antiqua", Baskerville, "Bookman Old Style", "Bitstream Charter", "Nimbus Roman No9 L", Garamond, "Apple Garamond", "ITC Garamond Narrow", "New Century Schoolbook", "Century Schoolbook", "Century Schoolbook L", Georgia, serif;

Website Typography
font-family: Frutiger, "Frutiger Linotype", Univers, Calibri, "Gill Sans", "Gill Sans MT" , "Myriad Pro", Myriad, "DejaVu Sans Condensed", "Liberation Sans", "Nimbus Sans L", Tahoma, Geneva, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

Website Typography
font-family: Corbel, "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Liberation Sans", Verdana, "Verdana Ref", sans-serif;

Website Typography
font-family: "Segoe UI", Candara, "Bitstream Vera Sans", "DejaVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Trebuchet MS", Verdana, "Verdana Ref", sans-serif;

Website Typography
font-family: Impact, Haettenschweiler, "Franklin Gothic Bold", Charcoal, "Helvetica Inserat", "Bitstream Vera Sans Bold", "Arial Black", sans-serif;


Website Typography
font-family: Consolas, "Andale Mono WT", "Andale Mono", "Lucida Console", "Lucida Sans Typewriter", "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Liberation Mono", "Nimbus Mono L", Monaco, "Courier New", Courier, monospace;

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