web awesome typography…try it won’t hurt!
1. Palatino Linotype / Palatino
WINDOWS 97.09% / MAC 78.86%
This is a nice serif font that his pretty good support for both Mac and Windows based machines (97.09% of all windows machines have it, and 78.86% of mac’s). Yet very few people use it and instead default to georgia or times. As you can see it makes for great headlines, and I have used it with success as copy type as well. Worse case you can always default back to georgia, times, etc.
2. Tahoma
WINDOWS 96.09% / MAC 72.02%
I admit this is not one of my favorite fonts, but it does have many instances where it could be used effectively. It doesn’t seem to get used very often despite the fact that it could be an excellent copy font. Again there is always Arial or Helvetica if the machine doesn’t have Tahoma installed.
3. Impact
WINDOWS 95.85% / MAC 88.08%
Admittedly this font probably is overused in non-web related design. Since it is one of the “cooler” default fonts on most machines it tends to get a lot of use. Despite this fact there are plenty of good places to use it, and it works great for well… “impactfull” headlines.
4. Century Gothic
WINDOWS 85.44% / MAC 42.50%
This is a nice elegant font that was overused by graphic designers some time ago, but it has been locked away and shunned for some time now. It may almost be time to pull it back out of the tool chest. Not a huge percent of Mac systems come with it preinstalled, but most new ones do. Depending on your target audience this could be the perfect font to use. If you are worried about the low mac support you could always opt for Futura as well (which has very high mac support).
5. Arial Black
WINDOWS 97.73% / MAC 96.18%
Yup you don’t just have to use plain old Arial. Arial black is a nice bold font that could be perfect for headings, impacting headlines, and hell even a replacement for the Impact font mentioned above. I don’t know that I would use it for body text, but it is an option that should be realized in web typography.
6. Arial Narrow
WINDOWS 87.08% / MAC 91.01%
Arial again! We are not done yet, oh no. Much like arial black, arial narrow is a great font for headlines. Instead of the big bold in your face style of headlines you can use this typeface for more elegant subtle headlines. A nice change from the traditional arial, and can be used much like you would a condensed font.
7. Copperplate / Copperplate Gothic Light
WINDOWS 58.13% / MAC 85.85%
I will admit I hate this font, mostly because it is misused (and people will probably argue that it is not the fonts fault, but the designers). But there are times when it can be used effectively, and it has pretty good support on newer windows computers and most mac based computers. Most likely it will again be for headlines, larger headlines, as it is not terribly legible at small fonts especially when it isn’t properly aliased.
8. Gill Sans / Gill Sans MT
WINDOWS 43.09% / MAC 90.82%
No surprise I like this font. I think it works both in copy and in headlines, and it has fair support in both platforms. Anytime you use a font that has about 50% support rate you want to think about the next logical font to serve, but there are enough options specific to windows that would let you achieve the same typographic message with only subtle differences.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 12:32 am and is filed under web practice. 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.
Ken October 16th, 2008 at 11:58 am
Palatino is nice, but hard to use sometimes. I hope this is going to be better in the future.