Sans-serif fonts for the Web

Arial is a common font choice, largely because of its dominance on Windows. Its poor
design makes it unreadable at small sizes and a poor choice for body copy, although it can
be of use for headings. Mac users should be wary of choosing Helvetica—it’s an excellent
font, but it’s not generally shipped with Windows. Although you can specify fallback fonts
in CSS, again, there’s little point in making your first choice something that the majority of
people won’t see.

**Despite its lack of penetration on Windows, Helvetica is often used as a fallback sansserif
font, due to its prevalence on Linux.

Better choices for body copy are Verdana or Trebuchet MS. The former is typically a good
choice, because its spacious nature makes it readable at any size. Its bubbly design renders
it less useful for headings, though. Trebuchet MS is perhaps less readable, but it has plenty
of character, and is sometimes an interesting alternative, simply because it isn’t used all
that much online.
In recent times, Lucida variants have become popular, due to Apple using it not only as the
default font in Mac OS X, but also on its website. Despite Lucida Grande not being available
for Windows, Lucida Sans Unicode is common and similar enough to be used as a first
fallback. Usefully, Lucida is common on UNIX systems, meaning that sites using Lucida variants
can look fairly similar text-wise across all three major operating systems. Another
pairing—albeit one that’s less common—is Tahoma and Geneva, so use those with care,
providing more generic fallbacks.

See the following images for a comparison of several sans-serif fonts on Mac (left) and
Windows (right).
Serif