January 14, 2005

• Ack.. "passable".
• I'd have to say that combining easy readability with high likelihood of everyone having it installed, Verdana and Arial/Helvetica are, unfortunately, your best bets.
• I prefer either verdana 10px or georgia 13px. Even numbered pixel sizes for georgia typically looks like serious ass, while odd numbered pixel sizes renders verdana "unpassable" in my opinion. Only georgia and verdana were developed for screen resolution within the list you just mentioned. The rest are print fonts that have a hard time rendering as they *should* appear. /tosses my two pennies in...
• I've always preferred Verdana 10px. Yes, it's boring, but it's easy to read.
• My vote is use either "Sans" or "Sans Serif" and let the user's browser settings deal with it. That way everyone gets to see it in their own "best" font. I'm all for that.
• My blog is in Wingdings.
• I personally think 'Trebuchet MS' is a great font, and generally available on Windows boxes, I believe. Not sure what the equivelent on other platforms would be, if one even exists.
• For ease and speed of Reading -- Times New Roman or similar fonts with serifs, though they may look 'old-fashioned'. Arial and other serif-less foints slow comprehension down, in my experience.
• I tend to not like serif fonts on webpages. Maybe I just need to wear my glasses when I sit in front of my computer, but I find serif fonts harder to read than sans serif on webpages. On the other hand, if it's on paper, then it's serif all the way.
• arial 10pt
• I'm with Beeswacky: I find serif fonts to be much easier on the eyes, particularly when either larger or smaller than the norm. The very worst aspect of the Web is typography. Some stabs at fixing that were made back in the bad old days, but nothing ever came close to being practical. And don't even get me started about Windows. Lordy. I don't know how people can stare at that all day.
• Comic Sans! Comic Sans!
• I wear my glasses when surfing - indeed, all the time, and sometimes sites are difficult read, no matter what I do. I would think that the standard would be "what's easy for everyone to read while still making a statement." My complaint, however, it's more with type size than with font. Oh, and background/color versus text color choice is an even bigger turn-off when it gives me a headache. If you want anyone over the age of 42 to come back to your site, make it as easy to read as possible. But, if you don't care about us codgers, just remember that you'll eventually be one. It would be a shame if you could't easily see what you've written, some years from now.
• Agree with path about the font sizes and poor contrast between background and lettering. Find I want to be able to increase or decrease lthe sixe of text on a page, and if the contrast is poor, I simply won't bother in most cases to read on, but will go elsewhere.
• Hmmm... after tons of experimenting I have to admit Nostril's Arial 10 pt is working out the best. However I have a feeling that different fonts and sizes look different under various colors.
• as gamecat and the geezers have hinted at... it's really important that web designers do not mandate specific font sizes, for numerous reasons. and for what its worth, i've heard it said that you should stick with, like, either arial or times new roman unless you really know what you're doing.
• What Wedge said, mostly. Set text sizes with percent, and then it all scales beautifully. I don't know a great font for you, but keep in mind that you can always specify arial/georgia/times new roman as a backup font in case people don't have your special neato one. If you're already thinking about readability, you're probably ok setting the 1st priority font to something other than the defaults.
• Whatever MoFi's yellow scheme uses.
• The designer who came up with Comic Sans should be made to apologize to the entire world for that travesty of a font. Feh!
• I like serifs, for the same reasons beeswacky stated. I think I use Georgia on my blog. However, whoever wrote the template that I use for my blog did not allow increasing/decreasing font size. Although I've taught myself enough HTML to modify the hell out of the original template, I'm not sure how to address the font scaling issue. This makes me sad.
• drivingmenuts: Actually, the comic sans guy issued a non-apology. He only made it for children software, but the jackasses at Microsoft included it with the OS. I'm 24, not that myopic, and I read the web at about 200% of what is specified. Most sane website are allright.
• According to the web development class I took last semester, most users prefer a sans serif font of some type online, and a serif font in printed material. The studies we were given to look over actually said that sans-serif fonts are easier and more comprehensible on a computer screen for most people, while serif fonts are easier to read and more comprehensible in print. I know that it holds true for me, at least. Sans-serif fonts make me squint at the computer less. Which, of course, is completely opposite beeswacky's experience, so give the studies from my class however much weight you feel they deserve in light of personal experience. Obviously, you can't please everybody. My feeling is to use what seems most readable to you, but make sure to have a decent level of contrast in text vs. background color, and leave it scalable by the people who visit the site. That's probably the best way to make it usable across the widest possible readership.
• I use Verdana 10, but I've been playing around with Palatino lately. It's primarily because I never got around to changing some of the defaults in Movable Type, but it's been growing on me.
• I use Georgia at 12 px. It's a serif font, it's not too intrusive, and it's a screen font. Oh, and it also has a real italic variant, unlike most sans-serif fonts (excluding Trebuchet, which looks good in print, but not on screen).
• I've always disliked serifs. Arial, imho, is just a good all round font that everyone has on their 'puter (no point in using a font that people don't have, the page will just default back to whatever's in the preferences, usually arial, helvetica) & which looks good at most sizes. Verdana is nice for headings, titles, etc, imho, but personally I find it looks a little ungainly at 12pt & above. No offense to the design of MoFi because it doesn't bother me all *that* much. I like a nice clean modern look.
• i was using arial for a while there, nostril (until i read about the horror that serious designers have when confronted with that font - a pseudo-helvetica, gasp!). i do have to say that 10 point font stinks. i'm not that old, mind you, but tiny font sizes are a pain in the ass to read. way, way too many websites use small fonts to begin with and then use the internet explorer relative scaling - which means any browser that follows the W3C rules correctly will render the "small" text as "microscopic". if not for the control-plus make-the-text-bigger option in firefox, half the pages i visit would be unreadable... newscientist.com for example uses the damn tiny font. my own website uses lucida sans. it's a nice font. i also have sections that use verdana. i use relative font sizing with a css kludge that forces internet explorer and gecko-based browsers to actually use the same font sizes. i also drop in a default netscape 4-safe 12pt size. back when i had specified sizes, i use 14px to 16px sans-serif for ease of readability. i don't get the small fonts anyway. it's not like you're paying per-page for web space, so why treat it like the fine print on a contract form that needs to be one page? you've got all the virtual space you need, and some of your visitors might not only have difficulty reading small print, but could very well have no idea that their browser is capable of growing the font for them. my father in law for example was damn happy when i showed him the control-plus combo...
• I've always been a fan of Garamond. It has a certain elegance to it, not not so much that it turns into a flowery unreadable mess.
• I don't have arial in Firefox's pulldown menu, apparently I don't even have it in X's fontpath, and trying to use East Syriac Ctesiphon just crashed my browser. Till I figure out what's up with that I'm just leaving my browsers fonts as "serif" and "sans serif". In my word processor Zapf Chancery 12-point looks pretty.
• I want a font that is made out of cheese. That way I can have a fontue.
• ::rimshot::
• By the way, I just found something other slightly geeky Linux users who are weird enough to like some Windows fonts might like: the "corefonts" utility.
• Now that I've done that, I'm not very fond of arial. I like serifs myself. Andale mono ain't bad, but then I also like monospace fonts. Hey drivingmenuts, what's wrong with MS Comic Sans? Try it with the New York Times site for a new view of news.
• I'm still wondering why Bookman Old Style hasn't caught on more. It's a serif font that looks "friendlier" than Times New Roman or Garamond; not reccommended below 10pt, but in larger points can double as a display font; the "swash" characters in the expanded/expensive character sets have been used for a lot of common logos, from The Coffee Bean to The Heritage Foundation (shudder) to New York Magazine to this blog, and, no, I don't think it's ugly.
• I like that font, wendell, but I am extremely far-sighted and one eye almost useless so I need very clear typeset with clear spaces between lines. No matter how big I set the view and sit far back from the screen I would burn these eyes out trying to read much of the, ahem, last site you mentioned. I'd need one more space between the lines for that page. I have to go right to the source on my machine and control the font and size and screen colours on the monitor. So I suppose I can be said to be colour blind to the web, except for commercials which defy my commands. I keep my font size at 20 - 24. Times and serif. /just in case folks would like to think of us poor eyeballers.
• I hate my blog's font on my windows box but love it on the mac.. it's just plain old sans serif.. so I'm guessing it's this ariel-as-helvetica's-poor-stepchild thing I've been hearing about.
• I like Garamond too. I did have Helvetica for sans-serif, but now I think Verdana looks better, at least for the way I use it. My favourite serif font in print was Galliard, but that seems to have disappeared.