Simian Design

December 1, 2004

What is Helvetica and Arial Black?

I’ve used these survey before many times, and thought I’d share them with you.

They did a survey to find the most common fonts that were available on a machine. They did this for Windows and for Macs.

The top three on Windows are: * Arial Black (94.62%). This is a hideous font, and should go away. * Comic Sans MS (93.6%). It’s not great, but I suppose it has it’s uses. I just don’t know what they are. * Verdana (93.35%). Ahh. Sweet Verdana. This is a good one.

Yeah, you’re probably noticing that Arial didn’t make that cut. It’s fourth with 92.93%.

Top three Mac fonts? * Helvetica (96.69% - heh. 69) The GodFather of fonts. * Monaco (95%.93) I like Monaco. * Arial Black (95.04%) Fucking Arial Black again. I hate this font.

Arial is fourth on the Mac systems as well, at 94.91%.

Anyways, I’ve used this list in the past when trying to look into some interesting font variants to display, or have as backups, in my CSS.

Post Info

Tagged As CSS, Design, HTML, Mac

Comments are Open (4)

Posted at 08:21 AM

Comments

eliot

Times New Roman didn't cut the top three? I thought everyone used that for everything. Good lord, what a boring font. Garamond is so much better.

Posted by: eliot | December 5, 2004 08:36 PM

Tony

I'd take boring over awful any day of the week. Arial Black is just downright offensive.

Just be happy we can stack font-family declarations up, and have them degrade down the list.

Posted by: Tony | December 5, 2004 09:16 PM

some guy

if Arial is fourth on both lists, why not make your list a "top four" instead of explaining Arial in such a circuitous way?

Posted by: some guy | May 1, 2005 10:09 AM

Tony

Because "Top Three" is standard. or "Top Ten". Not "Top Four".

Plus, the post wasn't about Arial. There wasn't any real direct point I was making, other than the top couple of fonts were not what I'd expect.

As for the circuitous way of explaining things, well, that's just me and how I write.

Posted by: Tony | May 1, 2005 10:33 AM