Best Font To Use For Webpages

Survey statistics

These figures are the cumulative total of about 8 survey submissions per week since January 2003, 2633 total. The Windows applet-based survey was introduced on 21 April and is currently recording the frequency of 281 of the most common Windows fonts.

. Info sourced by Codestyle.

Font name	Installed (%)
Microsoft Sans Serif	99.40%
Arial Black	96.85%
Franklin Gothic Medium	96.79%
Palatino Linotype	96.33%
Verdana	95.97%
Comic Sans MS	95.44%
Arial	95.40%
Lucida Console	95.29%
Courier New	95.14%
Impact	95.02%
Tahoma	94.95%
Sylfaen	94.19%
Trebuchet MS	93.66%
Lucida Sans Unicode	91.57%
Georgia	89.18%
Arial Narrow	86.02%
Century Gothic	83.63%
Bookman Old Style	83.06%
Times New Roman	82.80%
Vrinda	82.57%
Kartika	82.36%
Book Antiqua	82.07%
Monotype Corsiva	81.14%
Garamond	76.72%
Lucida Sans	75.65%
Haettenschweiler	70.15%
MS Reference Sans Serif	67.74%
Bradley Hand ITC	59.12%
Papyrus	58.92%
French Script MT	58.32%
Tempus Sans ITC	58.12%
Edwardian Script ITC	57.11%
Franklin Gothic Book	57.11%
Franklin Gothic Medium Cond	56.91%
Perpetua	56.91%
Copperplate Gothic Light	56.71%
Lucida Bright	56.71%
Curlz MT	56.51%
Engravers MT	56.31%
Franklin Gothic Demi	56.31%

These are only the top forty fonts, see the full Windows font survey results (about 100 KB) for a complete listing.

Several of the lowest rank fonts have been removed from the current survey of best fonts, but their reported frequency is recorded here for reference.

UK Government recommendations on best fonts to use:

Use only clear, commonly used fonts. Avoid the use of small text. Users should have the ability to scale fonts.

Guidelines for UK Government websites
Illustrated handbook for Web management teams

Jakob Nielsen’s Readability Guidelines for Website Font Size

• Do not use absolute font sizes in your style sheets. Code font sizes in relative terms, typically using percentages such as 120% for big text and 90% for small text.
• Make your default font size reasonably big (at least 10 point) so that very few users have to resort to manual overrides.
• If your site targets senior citizens, use bigger default font sizes (at least 12 point).
• If possible, avoid text that’s embedded within a graphic, since style sheets and font size buttons don’t have any effect on graphics. If you must use pictures of text, make sure the font size is especially large (at least 12 point) and that you use high-contrast colors.
• Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site’s visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don’t recommend such a button for mainstream websites.
• Maximize the color contrast between the text and the background (and do not use busy or watermarked background patterns). Despite the fact that low-contrast text further reduces readability, the Web is plagued by gray text these days.’

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 19, 2002

Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005

• #1 – Legibility Problems
  Bad fonts won the vote by a landslide, getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake. About two-thirds of the voters complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; about one-third complained about low contrast between text and background.
• http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/best-font-size/