Web Core Fonts & Windows Vista

Stuart Brown has written a nice article at Modern Life about the Core fonts for the Web and the New Vista Fonts; a fresh addition to the Web Typography.

Once upon a time, back in the early days of the world wide web, when Windows 95 was still revolutionary and Internet Explorer was actually a sensible choice over the competition, Microsoft bestowed a gift unto the web which persists to this day: the Core fonts for the Web project.

Thanks to quick adoption of Internet Explorer, and the dominance of Windows in the home OS market, these standard set of typefaces quickly found their way into the vast overwhelming majority of user’s font directories - penetration to the extent that these fonts formed the basis of web design at the time, and still play an important role to this day.

The core fonts consisted of the now-ubiquitous Arial, Courier New, Georgia, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, and Verdana, amongst others. This limited selection has formed the backbone of typography on the web - every major news publication likely specifies one of these fonts. Indeed - until today, Modern Life was using Georgia as a primary font.

These fonts have been in place since 1996 - over 10 years of dominance in the (admittedly lacklustre) world of web typography - and now, with the launch of Windows Vista, we finally have some fresh additions to the arsenal of default type.

You can now upgrade font-family declarations in your stylesheets to one of the following:

font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: Corbel, Verdana, "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif;
font-family: Candara, "Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, sans-serif;
font-family: Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
font-family: Constantia, "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, Georgia, serif;
font-family: Consolas, "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Courier New", Courier, monospace;