Design Patterns 2 - web fonts

Michael Dain, Thursday, February 14, 2008 @ 10:15 am

Calibri

In the oxymoron that is web typography, i want to give great praise to Microsoft that gave the world Georgia, Trebuchet MS, Verdana Tahoma and some other fonts I don't care too much for. It is ironic that they have really pushed forward the world of web design far more than the "design oriented" mac crowd. They are continuing the good work with their new Vista font - Calibri. A lovely font that can rescue many sites from Arialville, and comes with install of IE 7 or of course Vista. It is also the default system font which saves default Word users from Times New Roman, which is a huge improvement. I also want to give a public "meh" to Apple for keeping their system fonts (I'm thinking "Lucida Grande" ) to themselves and not offering free downloads to Windows users. Come on, is there that much profit in this that we can't rely on a base set of screen readable fonts for our users? Pretty please guys?

For mac users - I would love to link up where to download this, but searching seems to reveal you get it as part of installing a powerpoint 2007 viewer, and as a PC user, I think if you install Safari, they may bundle in Lucida, good luck!

user experience design

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   Hi Michael,

   One thing to remember- folks like me with a 2 to 3 diopter difference in our eye glass prescriptions who also use bifocals don’t much care for skinny sticked fonts with serifs. This was one reason Arial/Helvetica was so great and why Verdana is so easy on our eyes.

   Please don;t forget us!

   Comment by Scot Witt, Wednesday, March 19, 2008 @ 6:18 pm

2. 

   If you are saying that Microsoft has done a great deed by eliminating Times New Roman, then perhaps you have not tried to print a PDF document and gotten the alien glyphics that try to replace Times New Roman. Maybe we have forgotten that Times New Roman was preferred by the London Times because it was immanently readable even in copies of copied copies of text.

   Comment by John Vizzuto, Thursday, July 24, 2008 @ 8:59 am

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