Typographic Resources
Need information about web fonts? Here's a whole bunch.
I found a massive resource list of typography links and articles posted by Michael Tuck in reference to his article called 8 Definitive Web Font Stacks (an article that I talked about in a previous post). I haven’t even begun to explore the various resources, but the ones I’ve seen look amazing! Be sure to check them out. The comments for each item are Michael Tuck’s.
- @font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work (Jon Tan tutorial about implementing @font-face in IE)
- 100 Best Fonts (listing of the most popular fonts, rather traditional in focus. Wish I could read German)
- 15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography; Under the Bonnet part II: taking a list apart (strong examination of the typography behind the A List Apart design)
- 16 Best-Loved Font Bits In Web Design (well-written examination of some of the writer’s favorite fonts — a nice mix of well-known fonts with others you may have seen but may not be able to readily identify)
- 3 Reasons Why the New Vista Fonts Suck
- 30 Fonts That ALL Designers Must Know and Should Own (good basic list, and some of the "must know" choices will surprise you)
- 465 Free Fonts for Ubuntu (many, many free fonts for Linux owners)
- A Plea From 16 Most Overused Fonts (whimsical article begging for the named fonts to just go away for a while; we’re all guilty of overusing at least one on this list)
- Admiration for Typography on the Web
- Adobe Originals (good Wikipedia article about the numerous fonts distributed over the years by Adobe)
- All Fonts Preview (nowhere near "all fonts," but gives graphical comparisons of a large number of widely available Mac and Windows fonts in a comparable size)
- All you wanted to know about Web type but were afraid to ask (not nearly this comprehensive, but a good resource nevertheless)
- The Anatomy of Web Fonts (SitePoint article by Andy Hume, excellent basic tutorial. If you’re hopelessly confused, start here)
- Are Vista Fonts Ready for the Web?
- Arial versus Helvetica
- Beautiful Web Typography: 7 tips on de-sucking the web (fascinating slide presentation)
- Better CSS Font Stacks (one of the articles that gave me the impetus to write this article)
- The supplement to Better CSS Font Stacks
- Better ways to use fonts in web design (examples of smaller, tighter font stacks for a variety of fonts and desired effects)
- Better web typography (includes good primer tutorial, in PDF format)
- Bitstream Vera Fonts (Gnome source for free, licensed Bitstream fonts)
- Choosing the right font for your blog
- Common fonts to all versions of Windows and Mac equivalents (good if limited chart for comparison, good selection of screenshots)
- Complete Guide to Pre-Installed Fonts in Linux, Mac, and Windows (compare fonts to one another w/graphic images of different fonts; quite expansive and useful)
- Complete Microsoft ClearType Font Collection (graphical comparisons of variants of the Microsoft Vista fonts as viewed with ClearType font smoothing)
- CSS font matching: Windows, Mac and Linux
- CSS font sampler and survey
- CSS Font Stacks (alternative sets to my proposals; smaller, tighter stacks, with visible if limited comparisons)
- CSS and Vista’s New Fonts (discussion of Vista’s comparatively smaller fonts)
- DejaVu Fonts (free download of DejaVu fonts, originally intended for Linux users but free to all comers)
- Display Type and the Raster Wars (as noted in the article, Jon Tan’s acerbic and insightful view of Microsoft’s use of ClearType, with particular attention paid to how it works in IE 7)
- Don’t Be Afraid of Serif Fonts (nice study of sites successfully using serif fonts in their design)
- Downloading and Using Vista Web Fonts
- Supplement to Downloading and Using Vista Web Fonts
- The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web (in-depth, book-length analysis of the various elements of typography)
- Evaluating fonts: kerning (Pascal’s quick examination of kerning and other issues, including some comparisons of kerning issues with Times New Roman)
- exljbris Free Font Foundry (free font download site, of markedly higher quality than your average fonts. Many come with variants such as italics, boldfaces, etc)
- Font Chart (VisiBone’s rather cramped but info-packed chart listing the 65 most widely available browser fonts and giving side-by-side comparisons — available in .GIF or on card stock)
- Font Families and Web-safe Fonts: The Point of Penultimate Resort (a discussion of "web-safe" fonts and the limitations of the concept in practice)
- Font-Family.com (auto-generates basic font stacks based on initial preferences)
- font-family discussion
- Font Finder (must-have Firefox add-on that allows you to select an element of a Web page and see its font stack and other CSS styling)
- Fontbooklets (cool, free method of examining and comparing fonts in both print and electronic displays)
- FFontMatrix (ambitious project still in development, to provide comparisons of font stacks as proposed by users)
- Fonts for the Web
- Fonts for web design: further comparison of cross-platform dependability (tables comparing frequency of fonts found on Windows, Mac, and Linux machines)
- Fonts for web design: a primer (good visual comparisons between some core font pairs)
- Fonts on the web and a list of web safe fonts
- Fonts included with each version of Windows (lists the fonts supplied with a number of Windows systems, also lists numerous non-English fonts such as Estrangelo Edessa, Shruti, and Vrinda).
- Fonts supplied with… (meticulous but out-of-date listing of fonts supplied with IE5x, FP 2000, Office 2000, Word 2000, Win 98, Win XP, and Win 2000)
- Fonts Used by Companies in Logos and Branding (lists the fonts used by companies in their logos and branding — in German, unfortunately for me)
- Free fonts from recognized font foundries
- Free UCS Outline Fonts – Summary (home of GNU FreeFont series)
- GNU FreeFont (view FreeFonts as they appear on screen)
- Download site for FreeFont series
- Great Fonts for Web 2.0 (good examples of some lesser-known alternatives used in more modern designs)
- The Helvetica Hegemony: How an unassuming font took over the world
- II Love Typography
- Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix
- Font Matrix (large, fairly comprehensive font matrix showing fonts installed with various Mac, Windows, MS Office, and Adobe software; no Linux fonts and therefore not complete)
- Interview: Opening shots in the Second Font War
- Is Microsoft’s Vista Font Just a Copy? (article questioning if the Vista font Segoe UI is a ripoff of another font, Frutiger)
- It’s time we take back Times New Roman on the web (nifty tricks to breathe new life into an old chestnut)
- Legally Get Vista Fonts from Microsoft, No License Required (by installing the PowerPoint Reader)
- Let’s Talk About x, Baby (x-height discussion)
- Liberation Fonts (source for Linux RedHat Liberation series free fonts)
- Liberation fonts (official RedHat source for Liberation fonts)
- Liberation fonts (informative Wikipedia article on the Liberation fonts)
- Linux equivalents Verdana, Arial fonts (comparison between several Linux fonts and "core" fonts Arial and Verdana, as well as a monospace comparison. Very useful, but I wish the author had provided a similar comparison to "core" serifs)
- Linux Font Equivalents to Popular Web Typefaces
- Linux fonts (mostly X11)
- List of fonts in Mac OS X (features an excellent graphic giving examples of the many, many fonts OS X users have available to them)
- The Logos of Web 2.0 (fonts often used to achieve that "Web 2.0" look)
- Lookalike Fonts (by no means a comprehensive list, but a fair compilation of free "lookalike" fonts that match up, more or less, with commercial fonts)
- Luxury Type (design and typography maven Jeff Croft gives us some slightly less traditional stack alternatives)
- Mac OSX 10.4 Fonts List
- Mac OSX 10.5 Fonts List
- Microsoft’s ClearType Font Collection: A Fair and Balanced Review (detailed review of Microsoft’s six Vista fonts)
- MiniFonts (source of some of those cool small, clear "pixel"fonts you see around the Web)
- Pixel Fonts, Screen Fonts, Bitmap Fonts, Small Fonts (a listing of several small-font and pixel-font providers)
- Mozilla Developer Center: font-size-adjust
- The Myth Of ‘Web-Safe’ Fonts
- The Next Big Thing in Online Type (thoughtful, sympathetic examination of the six main Vista fonts)
- The New CSS Font-Family List (gives some rather attenuated alternatives to my stacks)
- The new typography (among other things, documents the large penetration of the Lucida family of fonts)
- New Vista Fonts and The Web
- Not-so ClearType :: Apple FTW (Sitepoint blog slamming Microsoft ClearType)
- The Palatino FAQ
- The Principles of Beautiful Typography (excellent and comprehensive excerpt from Jason Beaird’s book The Principles of Beautiful Design; this is a good place to begin exploring the entire subject of typography in Web design)
- Reading Design (strong ALA article)
- Simple CSS: Creating More Readable Text (excellent, if quite basic, walkthrough to creating usable, readable font displays on your page)
- Smashing Magazine (has a number of articles on fonts and typography, including a number of free font offerings that stand well above the usual freebie offerings, quality-wise)
- Start Testing Your Designs With and Without ClearType
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface (just read it)
- To Anti-Alias or Not to Anti-Alias? (good discussion of whether or not to use aliased fonts in design and testing)
- To Helvetica and Back (a celebration of the myriad variants of Helvetica, and an offering of several alternatives)
- Topics: Design: Typography (excellent ALA article archive)
- Trebuchet Nation
- Typechart (gives extensive and varied samples of some major Win and Mac fonts, as well as the CSS to use them)
- Typetester (invaluable resource for comparing fonts with one another)
- Typographic Alternatives to Helvetica (some lesser-known choices in the listing makes this article all the better)
- Typographica
- Typography on the web (another good intro page, with graphic examples)
- Typogrify (compilation of Django templates that automatically add CSS and other styling to your typography)
- Typogrify: easily produce web typography that doesn’t suck (walkthrough of Typogrify functions)
- Typophile
- Visual reference to 19 fonts for cross-platform web design
- Web Design is 95% Typography
- Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting (Google books excerpt only); Budd, Clarke, Lloyd, et al; copyright 2007 friends of ED
- Web Safe Fonts (lists well over 100 Web fonts, their chances of being installed on various computers, and a visual comparison; does not list Linux fonts, and does not show fonts not installed on your machine)
- Web Style Guide: Typography (another comprehensive primer)
- Web typeface specimen screens (excellent compilation of detailed "specimen screens" for a number of common Windows and Mac fonts)
- Web Typography
- Web Typography Cheat Sheet (aptly named article, nice reminder of the benefits of spacing, sizing, etc)
- Web Typography Sucks
- Web Typography Tutorial (strong primer for the ideas behind web typography and font selection, with copious illustrations)
- Windows loves Arial (article about Windows XP forcing users to view sites in Arial over Helvetica)
- Windows Vista Fonts Compared to Typical Web Fonts (PDF file, provides side-by-side comparisons of Vista fonts to various Windows and sometimes Linux fonts)
- World Class Cities (explains where the names for all those old Mac fonts such as Chicago and New York came from)
Good sources and/or lists of so-called "core" fonts:
- Core fonts for the Web
- SourceForge’s free, licensed download site for Microsoft’s core fonts
- Microsoft’s TrueType core fonts (alternate source of Microsoft core fonts, intended for Linux users but free for all comers)
- Microsoft Typography: Fonts and Products for Windows
- Fonts supplied with Mac OS
- Fonts supplied with UNIX / XFree and GhostScript
