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Comment by bjoli | Hacker News Reader

Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font.

I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.

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I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern, which I strategically use as a geek shibboleth.

I like you.

Language support used to be huge: I shipped web fonts for years so things would render accents and non-English characters correctly or at all. Dropping Windows XP was joyous.

These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.

"Boring" is fine by me. Easily-confused characters are not.

I don't agree about Verdana. Boring typefaces are fine; typefaces designed for the 640x480 displays of the 1990's have very little space today.

YMMV but I found Verdana to be a perfect font for my Kindle.

Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).

One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector.

So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished.

Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.

I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.

You could make your presentations more "multimedia" so the people at the back of the room can smell the difference.

I think the word you are looking for is multimodal.

I don't necessarily like verdana, but it is a very legible font for small font sizes. I happen to like a lot of information on my screen, and I keep font sizes low. For a long time Verdana was my default font for the web.

I dislike it as it gets larger though.

I really like Arial and I'm not afraid to admit it.

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