Web Typography
For the past few nights, I've been formulating some new rules for typography in the new OSX web browsers. Jaguar is set up to anti-alias everything above 8 pts, and that font smoothing dramatically effects how type appears onscreen.My system up until now has been to use 12px Verdana for body copy and 10px Verdana for captions. That's not going to cut it anymore. It looks great on MacOS9 and Windows 98 and 2000, but on OSX everything sort of blurs together. Captions are hard to read, and body copy looks too clunky.
The solution I've come up with is two-fold. There's a new sans-serif typeface that's just for OSX called Lucida Grande. It looks much crisper at 10px than Verdana. For regular body copy, I'm staying with Verdana, but bumping the point size down a notch (11px) for all platforms.
I put together a series of utilities for comparing screenshots of the fonts. If anyone has access to Windows XP, I'd like to see how its anti-aliasing stacks up. Here's the app that allows you to change the font selection, along with a way to upload the screenshots.
Posted June 23, 2003
CMU Grad Studio