While the phrase ‘web typography’ is large and fancy-looking, it really just means the use of fonts on Internet websites. Fonts, the size and style of the typeface in which something is written, are already familiar to us because literally everything written has a certain font. But applying fonts to text on the web can be a little tricky.

Web-safe Fonts – Why Are There Only a Dozen Choices?

Because of the wide range of computer operating systems, there are only a handful of fonts that are considered ‘web-safe’- safe to use on websites because they are installed on all major operating systems. Web-safe fonts include:

• Arial
• Arial Black
• Comic Sans MS
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

While other fonts that can be found on the Internet are a lot more interesting, not everyone is assured to have a specific downloaded font on their computer. It’s good practice to use one of the fonts above so the text will be seen the same no matter who views it.

So What Do the Web-safe Fonts Look Like?

One of the best resources to test and view web-safe fonts is Typetester, which not only lets you dynamically test the text you want, but also has controls for color, size, alignment, background color, etc. Using this tool, you can narrow down had you want your text to look on your website with ease.

What are Your Thoughts?

Do you have a favorite web-safe font? Do you have a favorite font you wish was web-safe? There are a few known of ways to include a non-safe font on a website- do you think these work for everyone and are they worth it? What do you think about fonts, web-safe or not?