Attn: Webmasters | Stop using Helvetica and Lucida Grande!
Why do I consistently see Helvetica and Lucida Grande used for body copy on websites? Do these people not have PCs? Am I missing something here? They might look fine on a Mac but they look like doodoo on a PC with browsers that don’t give aliasing.
Look at Apple’s store as viewed in Firefox on a PC:
That looks terrible. Please use Arial or Lucida Sans Unicode so I don’t vomit when looking at your website.
Thanks.
Antonio has this to say:
6/13/2008
This is why designers list secondary and often tertiary fonts in their CSS. Duh.
admin has this to say:
6/13/2008
Antonio, I am a PC user that has Helvetica installed, so my machine obviously won’t display a secondary font.
Steve has this to say:
10/2/2008
I totally agree, I keep coming across these sites and just pass them by as they look tacky and are hard to read.
I’ve also noticed that some sites look bad in Firefox 3 but look ok in the inferior IE7 – see Adobe’s dreamweaver cs4 page for example – http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/?promoid=BPDEC – as with Apple I would have thought these sites would be aimed at all browsers.
It’s a wierd practice that seems to be gaining pace.
James has this to say:
3/20/2009
Haven’t you heard of cleartype? http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/step1.aspx
Marcel has this to say:
4/13/2009
James, not working with FireFox. Businesses need to account for PC users. Still a huge chunk who have to look at diarrhea.
Darryl has this to say:
12/4/2009
In this situation I would suggest using a CSS font stack with Segoe UI as the primary font (PC users) , Helvetica as secondary (Mac users) and sans-serif or Arial as the tertiary font.
Segoe UI looks very similar to Helvetica but is specifically designed to be highly-legible at small point sizes for screen-based applications. It comes installed with Windows Vista, Windows 7 -even some XP users have this font installed.