should i use Arial or Times New Roman to represent my brand?

• ering
• June 9th, 2008
• 05:33:18 PM

Never, since the days of using my family’s Macintosh Classic, have I felt so limited by font choices…though it’s unlikely that, as a 6-year-old, I would have cared that much.

Since the web is generally still relying on the user’s computer for fonts, I can’t design for the web using Ayres Royal Regular just because I feel like it. (There is, of course, sIFR but it’s a bit unreasonable to sIFR an entire site.) So that leaves us with a short list of fonts widely available on computers everywhere a.k.a. system fonts.

You can bet that every computer will have a serif font, a sans-serif font and a monospace font. A slightly less-safe bet, is that everyone’s computer will have these fonts:

• Arial / Helvetica
• Arial Black
• Courier (New)
• Georgia
• Palatino (Linotype)
• Times (New Roman)
• Verdana

Georgia is popular on the web these days; it has large counters (e.g. the hole in the “o” or the “e”) making it legible at small sizes, and it looks friendly. But…Georgia bold (and bold italic) looks like a poor man’s Bodoni. My other complaint about Georgia is, when used as a headline or title, any numerals are displayed old-style, sometimes going below the x-height. I find it very disruptive. Old-style numerals look great in body copy, and can look wonderful in general if designed well.

For these reasons, I’d like to stay away from Georgia (unless it’s a bit of Georgia italic, here and there). Palatino’s alright, but it has ugly quotes, so that’s out. Verdana feels unrefined. I’ll just stick with the classics: Times New Roman and Arial!

Really, you only need one font, any font, and some typographic skill and you’re set. As an example, the current classic of one-system-font design: Seed Conference web-page. Wonderful!