Fonts on the web and a list of web safe fonts
July 18th, 2007 by Dustin Brewer
Many of you have been asking, “What fonts are safe for me to use on the web?” and “Is there a list of web safe fonts for reference?” Well I am here to help. Web safe fonts are ever important but a lot of designers I have seen lately are forgoing this important step in their design creation. Some are taking the steps to use a font similar to a web safe font but because it is not in fact web safe they inevitably have to default back to a font that isn’t quite the same. Their design loses a little of itself and at this point they typically struggle to find a font that is close and web safe. There are plenty of web safe fonts available it just takes some creativity in using them to your advantage. I have a list of web safe fonts available in the article to help everyone out.Some of you that may have heard of the term web safe before and not quite known it’s meaning, others don’t fully know the reasoning behind it. I am here to clear all of these things up. First off, web safe fonts are those that are nearly universally available on any computer. So that when the end user, regardless of their machine preferences, goes to the web site they get the same experience as anyone else going to the web site. This is what web standards are all about and ensuring that you are using web safe fonts throughout your website is just as important as including a DOCTYPE and HTML tag in the beginning.
A little background on fonts
So now that I have explained what web safe fonts are you need to know a little about fonts themselves to make sure we are all on the same page. There are basically two types of fonts there are serif and sans serif fonts. Serif fonts are fonts that have fine cross lines at the ends of the letters. Sans serif (French for without serifs) are fonts that don’t have anything at the end of the letters. The most common serif font is Times New Roman and just happens to be the default for most windows-based browsers.
Monospaced fonts are fonts that have the same amount of space between them for all of the letters.
There are others types of fonts that fall into one of these two major categories but I think I will save that article for another time and focus on the topic at hand. Be looking for an article on Typography to be coming up soon.
A list of web safe fonts and more
Below I have included a table listing out all of the most common fonts and what operating systems they usually come with. Granted most machines have a lot more fonts then this, the ones I have listed are the most popular and mostly considered universally acceptable to use as a web safe font.
Web safe and common fonts
| Generic | Font | Windows 9x/2K/XP |
Windows Vista |
Mac Classic |
Mac OS X |
Linux Unix |
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| serif | Cambria | 
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| Constantia |
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| Times New Roman |
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| Times |
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| Georgia |
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| sans-serif | Andale Mono |
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| Arial |
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| Arial Black |
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| Calibri |
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| Candara |
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| Century Gothic |
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| Corbel |
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| Helvetica |
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| Impact |
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| Trebuchet MS |
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| Verdana |
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| cursive | Comic Sans MS |
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| monospace | Consolas |
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| Courier New |
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| Courier |
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*The green marks show very common fonts, the yellow shows not so common but all are generally accepted as web safe.
Looking at fonts through web development
Now that you have a list to go off it is good to know some best practices of using fonts on the web. It is very important to include fall back fonts when you are creating your font selection on your web site. What I mean by this is choose your favorite font that you would prefer everyone to see as your pimary font and then include fall back fonts such as Century Gothic, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif would be a good way to list the fonts out in your CSS.
The reason you want to do this is to ensure the most amount of similarity between your readers so they all get the same look and feel of your web site. It also ensures that the fonts you use are close enough that they don’t break your web site because you used a font that on the screen is half the size of Verdana but because no one has that font everyone fell back to Verdana and the whole web site broke because of it. These are very simple rules to follow in order to ensure that you give a universal experience on your web site by using web standards and web safe fonts.
Popularity: 17%
July 18th, 2007
nice diagram/table! Surely Andale Mono is monospace though?
I didnt know Windows fonts were so varied these days (Consolas etc)
July 18th, 2007
Good article, handy to see all the fonts displayed in this way.
July 18th, 2007
Great article on fonts! I like the fonts list best.
July 18th, 2007
Great article on fonts, I would like to have seen a little more functionaluse of CSS in the article for those curious about structure but overall agreat article.
I hope to see the typography article come out soon as afollow up.
January 29th, 2008
I would also list the free “DejaVu” font family, it is included with Linux now and provides great alternatives to many of the web fonts listed here.
I particularly like DejaVu Sans and DejaVu Monospace. I set these as my defaults in my web browser for when people use “sans” and “fixed” respectively.
February 27th, 2008
I think its about time all browsers were pushed to have the following:
a. The same font support as eachother.
b. More fonts, not too many, and no tacky ones, just some nice usable fonts that are easy to read but offer something different to the usual few.
The rest of the web is moving forward, why are we still stuck with Comic Sans and his dull buddies. I want to be hanging out with the likes of “Calibri” and “Consolas” while im surfing the web!
February 27th, 2008
@liam There are always options like sifr that will allow you to use any font you have on your computer. It uses flash to render the font for visitors, because of that of course you would only want to use it minimally. http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr
February 27th, 2008
Finally, a concise list of websafe fonts in one place.
Well done!
February 27th, 2008
The cursive section should probably be renamed to “do not ever use” or removed all together. I know that everyone rips on Comic Sans, but seriously let not give unknowing web designers reason to justify it as a font selection by says it is platform independent.
February 27th, 2008
@dustin - Thanks this certainly is cool, and great for now! But its a needless hastle, certainly for present day this is a great solution, but I still think the ammount of fonts which work cross browser is pathetic. - Nice resource though.
February 29th, 2008
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February 29th, 2008
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March 24th, 2008
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March 25th, 2008
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March 31st, 2008
Andale Mono isn’t in XP by default, don’t know about vista. You have to download it
It’s a shame, there is no browsersafe sans serif monospaced font.
font-family: “Andale Mono”, “Lucida Console”, “Terminal”, monospace
will have to do then.
April 17th, 2008
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April 27th, 2008
There is such a disconnect between MAC and Windows operating systems. I can’t read my engineer’s drawings on my MAC because I don’t have Century Gothic font. How do you design for all?
April 29th, 2008
@Catherine It can be difficult sometimes when you are working with multiple operating systems. At the Ad Agency I work for we have Windows, OSX and Linux users all in the same department so things can get interesting when checking to make sure something looks good on various different mediums.
The best thing to do is educate others on the differences so that you can use web-safe fonts and Cross-operating system safe fonts. We typically make sure that everything is compatible with a basic Windows system and then worry about the others secondary because Windows has such a large percentage of the market share, regardless what percentage we have in our department.
May 11th, 2008
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May 21st, 2008
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June 13th, 2008
[…] Fonts on the Web and a List of Web Safe Fonts - Dustin Brewer […]
June 22nd, 2008
[…] like me, and want to try, this is a great place to start. Or if you like more tabular things, this one will show the fonts availability […]
June 26th, 2008
Neat table. Very useful reference. However, may I suggest/request that you move the symbol key to the top of the table? It took me a little while to figure out that the green/yellow symbol key was in a note below the table.
June 27th, 2008
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July 2nd, 2008
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July 10th, 2008
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August 13th, 2008
[…] Brewer has done some great researching work when he wrote this post. Fortunately for us, we now have a complete list (or almost!) of the fonts […]