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Fonts And Your Website

May 8th, 2006
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I recently read a post regarding the most popular fonts installed on a persons computer based on actual survey information. You can read the post here regarding Windows based users and it offers links to Mac and *nix users too.

This made me think a little bit about font choices and that perhaps sIFR which I wrote about previously has a much greater importance than any other typography method currently used on the web. So, let’s have a quick look at the font survey results for PCs and Macs:

On Windows based systems, the top 5 installed fonts were:

  1. Arial Black (95.40%)
  2. Verdana (94.10%)
  3. Comic Sans MS (93.80% – ‘cringe’)
  4. Arial (93.76%)
  5. Courier New (93.54%)

On Mac systems they were:

  1. Monaco (96.15%)
  2. Arial Black (95.61%)
  3. Arial (95.48%)
  4. Courier (95.48%)
  5. Helvetica (95.31%)

My favourite three fonts are Trebuchet MS, Georgia and Times New Roman. This is how they ranked:

  • Trebuchet MS – Win (90.72%) – Mac (91.29%)
  • Georgia – Win (83.78%) – Mac (90.79%)
  • Times New Roman – Win (78.19%) – Mac(88.27%)

What really surprised me is that Times New Roman was only installed on 78.19% of Windows systems but on 88.27% of Mac systems. I also expected Georgia to rank a bit higher on Windows based systems than what it has in this survey.

So what does all this mean? Well, basically it is not safe to assume that a user will have the font you are intending to display on your website. Even with modern computers, CSS and rich websites, something as simple as knowing a user has a font is still not 100% certain, in fact, no single font rated 100% installation. Based on these findings though, it seems fairly safe to make the following assumptions:

  1. Arial and Arial Black are extremely popular on Windows and Mac systems.
  2. Times New Roman is not as a safe font as most would think, being installed on less than 8 out of 10 Windows systems that participated in this survey
  3. The default fonts included with the operating system and with office suites seem to be the ones that have the highest install rates
  4. When dealing with CSS, it is ESSENTIAL to offer at least a secondary font name when defining your styles. eg: [Tahoma, Arial, Helvetica] or [Georgia, Monaco, "Times New Roman"]

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