Fonts on the Web

As we all know, there are only a couple of reliable fonts for the Web these days (and I suppose the ever-growing Linux crowd that becomes even less true everyday). Of course I'm speaking of the basic fonts that everyone seems to have: Arial, Times, etc. My question is this, since we only have a limited number of fonts that are cross-platform available, why can't they all be good ones?

My idea: let's infect the Web with good fonts. We should gather at a conference to determine the other good font faces out there. Once we've come up with a pretty good sized list that we can all agree on (let's say twenty or thirty new fonts so we don't have to do this every couple of years), we write a virus that infects all machines. All this virus would do is install these fonts, find everyone in your address book and move to their computers, then uninstall itself from your computer.

I'm coining this 'Viral Modernization.'*

*Don't really do this. I don't think they let you use a computer in jail.

Is this illegal?
Due to how it would be deployed, probably.

Does that make it bad?
Not in my opinion. It's the same as having every operating system come with the fonts when you buy/download it, except this is being done after the fact. I mean come on, the virus even uninstalls itself when its done. After a while, when every machine is 'infected', there would be a constant stream of millions of 'virii' checking your system for these fonts. To prevent ridiculous machine load on any machines, we'll give the 'virus' a month to do its thing.

But let's get back to reality. Over time I've developed certain ideas, thoughts, opinions and feelings about each font and what I think they should be used for. Here's the rundown:

Arial
Ah yes, Helvetica's bastard child. Arial seems to pride itself on being the standard sans-serif font on Windows boxes, and while this is all fine and good the world would be better served with just getting the real deal. Most Windows folk have never been told about Helvetica, but it's everywhere. Maybe the fact that ninety percent (and I'm being extremely generous with that figure) of the world not having it at their grasp makes it even better.

Sorry, back to Arial. This is a decent font for <h1>'s and for the times you need to cram a lot of words into a little space (around size 10 or 11 pixels), but otherwise this font is boring and unimpressive. I find I have a hard time reading chunks of anything written in Arial if it's going to take me more than a couple seconds to read, especially at 12 pixels, it makes me shudder.

Times/Times New Roman
Quite probably my least favorite Web font. Times New Roman is the standard font that shows up if you don't use any kind of font-formatting, and that's all that I can think of when I see it: "Someone forgot to format this page." I've seen this super-stylized in the headings of pages and at times (ha, get it?) it can be acceptable, but generally some sort of letter-spacing, altering or variant is needed to make things look respectable.

And at this point things seem pretty negative, but don't worry, they get better.
Just not yet.

Comic Sans
Craig will probably punch me in the kidney just for whispering the name of such blasphemy. There is a set niche of people that use Comic Sans, and none of them are good. This font isn't cute, this font isn't fun, this font is unprofessional, ugly and unnecessary.

My thoughts: never use this font. Ever.
In fact I'm going to go say a few Hail Mary's for having to subject your eyes to it.
My apologies.

Impact
I've heard of Impact being referred to as the "home-grown IT professional's design font of choice," and it seems pretty true. Check your local computer help places for this font and see what you get. But Impact isn't all bad. When used in small chunks I like this font, I just don't want to see it in logos or in any paragraph of text that I'm supposed to read.

And I'm not even sure how this became known as a 'technical' looking font. Maybe it all the straight lines or something?
(Note: most Macs seem to have this font, but not all of them. Of course that's what? Ten percent of five percent? Numbers that low get truncated, sorry.)

Georgia
Give me a second, let me bask in the glow of a nice serif font.

Georgia is in fact my serif font of choice. It comes nicely equipped with wide characters that are extremely easy on the eyes (especially in titles and <h1>'s), and text figures that make any site look somewhat sophisticated. Even at small ranges (without anti-aliasing) this font is very readable.

Use Georgia.
It's good for us all.

Courier New
I can really only see two legitimate reasons to ever use this font.

First, whenever you're showing me a code sample of something, use this font. It's the font I code it, it's the font that most people use for monospaced anything, so accommodate us. Almost all of its characters are easy to distinguish from one another (except for [], () and {}, for coding you'd think that the curly braces would be a bit more exaggerated).

Second, and this one is new to my list, is the typewriter effect. We recently used this effect on Springfield Museums' News list view, and it looks pretty slick.

Verdana
Verdana is not particularly fantastic for titles, but I could read 11 pixel Verdana on my screen for days straight. If it were up to me, it would be the standard font built into everything online.

This font was built for screen readability and like Georgia, has wide characters that are easy on the eyes. There is a reason that the majority of the good sites out there present their content in this font: it's appealing, it's easy to use, it's just great.

In fact, you may reading Verdana right now. This site uses Lucida Grande as it's main font, but if you don't have that we back it up with Verdana. (Why did we go with Lucida if Verdana is so good? Simple: something different.)

Secondary Fonts
There are a couple of 'secondary fonts' that a lot of users seem to have, but not everyone. These are fonts such as Tahoma, Lucida, and Helvetica, all good fonts but you DO have to take everyone into consideration. Secondary fonts are really good fonts to list first (contrary to their name) in font lists. I'm a huge Tahoma fan, and am disappointed that more people don't have it. It seems to come with Microsoft Office, but should be made available to everyone (either via viral modernization or download, whichever is easier).

Accommodating for Everyone
Finally, while I make cracks about Apple's marketshare numbers and such, that's no reason to cut anyone out of the equation here. You may be asking yourself, "this, from the guy that wants out of 800 x 600?" Yes, exactly. See it's easy to include everyone by just tacking on a ", sans-serif" to the end of your CSS font lists, whereas 800 x 600 is a complete new design. Also, that ", sans-serif" at the end will help out or Linux friends that may not have any of these fonts.

So quick summary, come on: more Verdana 11 usage, less Arial 12 usage, and Georgia text figures for life!