Font stack for my site

[happyoink]

I'm working on the details of the design for my WordPress theme, and I want to move away from the usual web-safe fonts a little.

The branding uses Cicle. So, ideally I would like to use Cicle for <h2> headings in the sidebar. I realise that not everyone has that font installed. So which fonts would you consider to be most similar to Cicle?

I have this at the moment:

Cicle [Ideal]
Franklin Gothic Book [Alternative]
Tahoma [Common]
Sans Serif [Generic]

Any other ideas?

[AlexDawson]

Century Gothic shares a lot of similarities with that font and its very common on Windows.

[Black Max]

It looks a lot like Helvetica Thin, but most people don't have that, either. Segoe UI, the Windows Vista default font, is a decent approximation. Century Gothic isn't a bad choice, either, but it's a bit Bauhaus and Art Deco to go with the Cicle font. And I don't think Tahoma works at all. I might try:

Cicle, "Helvetica Thin", "Segoe UI", "Franklin Gothic Book", "Century Gothic", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;

at least as a starting point.

[happyoink]

Hmmm, well I checked out Century Gothic and it seems too wide really. It's much wider than Cicle or Franklin Gothic Book. I'll check out Segoe UI. Funnily enough I'm using Neue Helvetica for body text so Helvetica Thin might work well as an alternative as a <h2> font.

[AlexDawson]

Silver Firefly, well take into account that many of the fonts you are mentioning will be installed on an extremely miniscule amount of systems, your primary font for example is likely (as not being bundled with software that I am aware of) will have less than 1&#37; of people browsing using it.

[happyoink]

I'm aware of that and I'm fine with it looking a bit different on most other computers, just that I'm trying to keep alternatives as similar as possible before falling back on common/generic fonts.

Century Gothic, Segoe UI and DejaVu Sans are too wide, it doesn't make sense when I try either font as a <h2> heading in my sidebar. Franklin Gothic Book is a bit wider than Cicle but it's quite a bit narrower than Century Gothic, Segoe UI and DejaVu Sans.

So I think now I'll go for:

Cicle [Ideal] - not many will have this installed.
Corbel [Alternative] - Vista users have this installed by default.
Franklin Gothic Book [Alternative] - some Window users will have this installed by default.
Tahoma [Common] - most Windows users have this installed and a lot of Mac users will have this installed, this is likely what Mac users will see.
Sans Serif [Generic] - this is installed on most PCs, this is most likely what Linux users will see.

I would include Century Gothic and Segoe UI if they weren't so wide. Same with DejaVu Sans for Linux users. If you have any other ideas (try for similar widths) then please feel free to share! Or is there a conditional comment or something I could use in the CSS to change the font-size whenever an user has either Century Gothic, Segoe UI or DejaVu Sans installed on their computer? I would include these fonts if there was a way of dynamically reducing the font-size a little for these fonts only.

I checked the numbers at http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-fa...ansSerif.shtml - very useful!