Web Fonts
Like nearly every other web designer on the planet, I’ve probably typed “verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif” more times than I care to think about. That decending font list is the backbone of web typography today but its become a bit stale. While it is possible to take advantage of some slightly less ubiquitous faces such as Lucida, Geneva, or Arial Black, for the most part we are stuck with Verdana. Don’t get me wrong, Verdana was a godsend when first released back in the Internet Explorer 4 days (heck I even remember when Verdana was a stand-alone download in the Microsoft TrueType core fonts for the Web) and it is still a fine choice for small, readable paragraph text on screen. It falls apart for use in headings, but is still the best choice in non font-smooting environments. Georgia, another face released at the same time is a very readable alternative to Times but simply has too much of an old style to really be used widely.
However, Microsoft has finally announced a new set of web fonts that will at long last add a little variety to the web. According to this article, there will be six new faces shipping with OS and other software products in 2006. The article features scans of the new faces so head on over for a preview.
Being a CSS-oriented seperation of style and form sort of guy, this is a welcome breath of fresh air for web design. But, like any other advancement on the web, the lowest (or at least middle) common denominator rules and it will be years before these fonts are widespread enough to be truly useful. Not to mention whether or not they are avialable on Linux or OS X, etc…