December 03, 2005
The Origin of Verdana and Georgia
If you know anything about web design, then you know that Verdana is the most screen-readable sans serif font and Georgia is the most screen-readable serif font. Probably less widely known is the history of Verdana and Georgia. In short, back in the mid-90's -- to help you frame this, think back to the time when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 -- Microsoft asked Matthew Carter (shown in the photograph), a world class font designer, and Thomas Rickner, a leading expert in True Type technology at Monotype, to create new fonts that would be optimal for reading on a computer screen. Microsoft wanted both a serif and a sans serif font. The result was the creation of Verdana and Georgia.
The creation of these fonts truly was a significant event. The design approach taken by Carter was a departure from tradional type design. Daniel Will-Harris has a great article on this theme, including an interview with Carter:
The following is a short excerpt:
In graphic design circles, people think of screen fonts as preview mode--it's only when the toner hits the wood-pulp that we usually judge a typeface.
But that's an increasingly short-sighted view of life. Larger numbers of computer users spend their entire time in front of a screen and never (or seldom) print anything. So it became obvious to us that this was a reversal of priorities--we should not approach this as one of doing printer fonts adapted for the screen, we should design them as screen fonts from the outset, the printer fonts are secondary in this case.
In the past I've been burned starting from outlines and trying to be extra clever in the hinting. So I finally deciding, ‘I'm better off grasping the nettle. What's most important is to get the bitmaps right at the sizes people use most often.'
Because Microsoft makes these fonts available for free, I don't see any reason not to use them. Indeed, Verdana includes 893 glyphs, which represents a fairly large subset of Unicode characters, including all Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters. That's a much larger subset of Unicode than most other fonts provide.
The following links provide more information about Verdana and Georgia:
Posted by Doug Sauder at December 3, 2005 01:43 PM