Web Safe Fonts… “?!$#$%” you say?

OK. You want to make web sites. If you’re worth your salt, you know typography on the web is impossible to control but possible to influence. Sizes are pretty much by suggestion only. As are all typographic factors. But the biggest question of all is the font choice. (type-face, for the typographically over-obsessed. Of course, you want a web page to basically look the way you intend it to look, but your font choices are limited.

You can google “web safe fonts” and come up with dozens of sites with half reliable lists. Your best bet is to compare those lists. 99% of the sites listing web safe fonts are woefully out-of-date and not maintained. That means like so much of the internet, freely available information abounds but accurate information is scarce.

So what’s poor you gonna do? You’re gonna do the right thing. You’re going to limit your overall set of font choices severely. Many design school students will cry and moan because they’ve been over-fed the importance of typography in courses that often preach that there is a right and a wrong way to design things (which is complete and total B.S. because all visual value is totally subjective and arbitrary)

The one thing they should be learning in design school is what I am telling you now:
Limits are good. The more limitations you have, the better your art/design will be.
The simple reason is, it makes you think harder and thus respond more creatively.

So choose from: Arial, Arial Narrow, Courier/Courier New, Futura/Century Gothic, Georgia, Helvetica, Impact, Times/Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana

The names separated by / are close approximations, of which one of the two should appear on a Mac or Windows machine. Some of the fonts are common simply because they’re distributed with Microsoft Office, which is pretty common. If you are on a different OS, such as Linux or BSD, then you have already learned that those systems offer little in the way of typography options.

You should probably only choose 1 or 2 fonts for a web site. That’s all most sites should ever need.

Generally, one font for titles and headings and one for body text. Maybe a third for things like code. That means monospaced fonts. For code, people are more particular than than typographers about the font they like and monospaced fonts are less cross-platform than others. So just use monospace in your css for code.

That’s it. Now focus on your page layout and colors.