Verdana is included with the MS Internet Explorer installer, and is therefore ubiquitous. Also it is designed to be very legible on screen at very small sizes. I don’t know how one would measure its popularity, though. Certainly it is one OF the most popular web fonts, but I have doubts that it is THE most popular.

oh course I know that I was part of the team and the lead that supported and help create both that and Tahoma. Don’t get too much credit for it though but I got paid. I made the small cap version of Tahoma too for Office.

To find the untold story of these fonts you can read some of it on my blog.

vince’s blog

If Verdana is the most popular, it’s only because they didn’t group Times, Times Roman, Times New Roman, Times New Roman MS, and whatever other variations web authors use in their documents.

Verdana is awesome, but I just can’t believe that it’s getting more use than Times.

Times / TNR have been the default fonts for web page typography since Mosaic picked it as the default. Can a font be considered popular if it’s what you get when you don’t specify a font? Of “specified” fonts Verdana would be the most popular - so i think the claim is valid. But I would say that.

Cheers, Si

PS. my hotmail address - iloveverdana@hotmail.com

Verdana is the best working font for the web (anti-aliased) in small sizes so far!

>I made the small cap version of Tahoma too for Office.
Hmm, smallcaps for Tahoma – i never have noticed that. Which version of Office, what?!

I don’t remember but it was done 1996-1997 or so and I believe from memory it was for Outlook but I don’t see it installed so don’t know where it eventually ended up. Maybe Publisher since they shipped the most MS fonts.

Either Tom Rickner or Steve Matteson hinted it but I just did the outlines.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/uppercase.aspx

at the bottom is the section on Small Caps and a sample of a few of them used as an example. It’s a Capital ’A’, a Small Cap ’A’ and a lowercase ’x’. To show the different heights of each. It was done about the time I wrote this article. It’s hard to believe it’s about 10 years old now.

Tahoma SC - ships with recent verisons of Media Center - “Small Caps” is one of the FCC mandated closed caption styles (no one uses these but they are required), so instead of doing the obvious we dusted off Tahoma Small Caps for this purpose.

What’s the purpose of this thread, guys ?

AS asked... “What’s the purpose of this thread, guys ?”

Does the subject line not make sense? Vinnie is questioning the Design Museum’s claim that Verdana is the most popular typeface on the Web, what do you think?

I generally specify Verdana or Georgia when designing web pages. TNR doesn’t even make the list.

- Lex

I think that if the Design Museum in London claimed that there was a purpose, is when they claimed that important ?

The best way to know would be to asign a web robot to look & set clear parameters that you are judging by. It seems like something you might be able to ask Google to do. It would be a fun promotion of thier tech. But really Microsquish should do it. It’s their ’thing’ that’s in question after all. Or maybe the people at Make magaizine could be goaded into trying to answer the question. Or some MIT students. But again, the question you would have to answer is what are you counting?: More sites? More Pages? More Paragraphs? More glyphs? Or a weighted combination. What sample size would be enough? Does numbers of eyeballs count too? Are you thinking of this like an ad man?

But be prepared for the possiblity that soon it will be some Ascender Chinese font that is #1.

;-)

A few years back I looked at the top 30 sites (using some published chart) and something like 25 specified Verdana, the rest Arial as first choice font. But obviously the top 30 sites would have had some “designer” input. :-)

Sounds like this would make for an interesting study. If we can agree on a good (and not too expensive) methodolgy I’d be happy to get one of our vendors to take a stab at it.

I doubt Verdana is used that much since it’s too bold.

Can you clarify what you mean by “too bold”?

Well if you have read my blog you can tell that it was made from a Bold menu beta font that had the name ’Ohana’ it was redesigned to be the companion of Tahoma. It is heavier than Tahoma because Tahoma was designed as a system dialog font and it was seen as too condensedfor Internet Explorer so Matthew made a font of a wider and more solid than Tahoma but lighter than the prototype font Ohana. So you are correct that it’s not a true bold.

But on screen Verdana, Times, and Tahoma share the same stem width (one pixel) when set in sizes that we see most often, no?

Yes I was incorrect thinking about older versions and not the final families. I moved off the fonts once they went to the final stages and worked on other things.

the Verdana and Tahoma UC H have the same stem width of 198 and ’O’ is 206 in both, but the overall black width of the ’H’ in Verdana is 1383 with an advance width of 1539, and Tahoma the ’H’ is 1232 with an advance width of 1383. Matthew made the black of the characters wider in many cases to increase the readability and to fix the compressed nature of Tahoma that was originally made as a UI font.

They also claimed “popular”, not “used”——if that is of any purpose/interest.
Vincent, I had fun watching the YouTube videos.

I believe in this case “They” is former DM boss Alice Rawsthorn who is a huge fan of Matthew, his work, and type in general. So before mobilizing the troops maybe we should consider that the DM claim is just the opinion of a single fan? Kind of like Steve Jobs saying U2 is the best band in the world.

See...

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/09/features/dlede10.php

http://www.newdesigners.com/page.cfm/Link=136/t=m

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/02/13/badesign...

and more...

http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=Alice+Rawsthorn+verdana

Yes that is exactly what I thought when I saw the screen at the Design Museum. Alice was talking to Matthew like he was a rock star. And I liked how he looked like he ate a lemon when he heard the ’joke’ about Comic Sans walking into a bar’.

I use to love Alice’s regular weekday spot on the Robert Elms show on BBC London (12-3p GMT). But she quit DM because of some internal things. And I haven’t heard her on the radio since.

Interesting, Simon Daniels, I was actually feeling quirky using an impersonal pronoun.

I don’t know very much about her, just the stuff in the press that you mention, but type needs fans, especially fans who are in a position to promote it.

>Alice was talking to Matthew like he was a rock star. And

I think that’s how most people talk to him :-)

And I think that’s how most people talk to him :-)

Indeed. See this thread. :)

Matthew is a genius, period. Georgia is what I use but that don’t make me a genius, just shows that I like great type.

Jordan

I like Matthew 4:18, “And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.”

This one could easily apply to fonts, and fonts on the web in particular... ;-)

Matthew 22:14 - For many are called, but few are chosen

Yeah Simon, right ? And 22:14 is about font manager softwares ; here is Jesus visintg Matthew for web purposes.

Well if you have read my blog you can tell that it was made from a Bold menu beta font that had the name ‘Ohana’ it was redesigned to be the companion of Tahoma. It is heavier than Tahoma because Tahoma was designed as a system dialog font and it was seen as too condensedfor Internet Explorer so Matthew made a font of a wider and more solid than Tahoma but lighter than the prototype font Ohana. So you are correct that it’s not a true bold.

So perhaps today they would have perhaps been called Tahoma and Tahoma UI, or Verdana and Verdana UI...?

I have found the original Tahoma Font Specification dated March 07 1995 which is the date the original bitmaps in the form of a .fon library were delivered to the Windows 95 development team.

This specific spec is for the first use of a font using the name Tahoma. It actually was the protype font ’Ohana’ renamed.

I supplied a bitmap font in a .fon form for 18, 22 pt VGA that would be used during the Windows 95 installation process. The reason a bitmap was necessary was during system installation there isn’t a rasterizer present so static bitmaps were used for text and graphics.

Outlines were made and a .ttf created Sept 02 1994 to a full Win/ANSI character set. This font was fully hinted in TrueType.

The original idea that Matthew had was to do something like Geneva on the Mac but the final result was a bit too close and it got scrapped.

I also made some bitmap only TrueType fonts of the original Tahoma bitmaps which had 3 sizes of bitmaps (11,12 and 14 ppem) and only circles for outlines. These were the ones used in testing and later when Tom Rickner was hinting he had to match the bitmaps I put in. The font at that time was called Tahoma Condensed.

I vaguely remember reading an article (maybe in The Times?) which said Arial was the most used typeface in the world by virtue of being the most common font used on web sites. Don’t know what their source was. Ring any bells with anyone?

Nope. Found it. It was Design Week...

“No one has exact figures for how often Arial is used. The number of PCs in the world is estimated at around 360 million, and Monotype estimates Arial to be on 95 per cent of all computers, making a figure of 342 million. If each computer uses Arial once a day, then what’s the guess: 120 billion uses in a year? That makes a trillion in a decade. These are figures that most designers can only dream of.”

Admittedly this is not conclusive.

I can’t think there are more machines (Mac, Windows and Linux) with Arial on than machines with Times New Roman. I’d still have to give TNR the edge. Defaults-wise TNR is the Word default, Arial is the Outlook default, people write and read more emails than Word docs so maybe Arial has the edge in terms of ’usage’ - how long until Calibri over-takes them is anyones guess. :-)

Web-wise my money is still on Verdana.

I agree.