Just about time to redesign my site. My question is, what are the best, clearest, and nicest looking fonts for the following?
[list][]Page headers[]Article headers[]Article body text[]Navigation links[/list]Also, what size fonts do you feel most comfortable reading for the above categories? As for colours, it will mainly be black on either a white or very light grey background in most cases.
I look forward to hearing your comments and ideas on this matter
Always use relative font sizes because then if your fon’t isn’t clear because it is too small then the user can just up the font size and make it clear.
If you will use relative font sizes, and the fonts Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif or Times New Roman , you will be Cross-Opearting System, Cross-Browser and with best Readability.
Being unhappy with the current wisdom and distrustful of our browsers, I wanted to have the font sizing options laid out so i could see where they did and didn’t work. So I made 264 screenshots.
This collection is posted for anyone else who is unhappy and distrustful.
Times New Roman is not guaranteed to work cross OS or browser. I believe on the Mac it’s called “Times” or “New York”. You will run into problems on various linux distros also. If you are going for a serif font, you will need to include a specific “serif” declaration toward the end of your font-family. Granted, some sort of serif font may be a system default…but that can be changed…
No worries. Can you confirm the Mac fonts? I think I have the names right (“Times” and “New York”), but am working from memory (I tend to use mainly sans-serif), so I could be wrong…
Aren’t fonts 12 px = 100% the default size of the major browsers?
If I remember well, I have read a study, were is mentioned, that the major browsers are getting more and more accessible, and all? browsers have the option to make the fonts smaller or greater, and if using the browsers default size, the user could make the fonts great enough to be accessible. Bellow that value, it is not guaranteed that it will be accessible to every kind of visually impaired persons.
IE/Win is still one of the major current browsers which does not allow resizing of absolutely specified font sizes (px, pt, etc).
as for 12px = 100% being the default size…well, in recent years all browsers (both Win/Mac) settled on adopting a standard size and the same interpretation of pixels per inch (ppi)…but safari is now breaking with that again, opting for a slightly different size. (there’s an interesting bit about this issue in Zeldman’s latest book…i’ll dig it out tonight and see if i can be a bit more specific)
They’re True Type Format, so I guess they’ll work on any computer that support it–I have them on my Windows 2000 machine, now. They’re pretty nice, but they seem to always be anti-aisled, which I don’t particularly like at normal screen reading sizes. It may show up differently on Linux?