Don’t Shoot the Ambulance, Verdana’s driving
I don’t quite understand why so many people keep complaining about Verdana. It has helped many a designer to create their design.
Down the Garden to Have A Fair Look
Since I keep reading rants about Verdana, I had to make sure: I went onto csszengarden.com to lead a survey in order to know what typefaces were used… csszengarden.com has become a somewhat good reference in web-designing when dealing with CSS (because apparently the anti-Verdana fight on this field). I browsed through the contributions, one by one, looked for the font used, and at what sizes. And there is no doubt. Verdana is still on the lead:
| Font name | Number of Uses |
|---|---|
| Verdana | 21 |
| Georgia | 13 |
| Arial | 12 |
| Times / Times New Roman | 4* |
| Trebuchet MS | 3 |
| Tahoma | 3 |
| Geneva | 1 |
| Lucida Grande | 1 |
| Courier | 1 |
*(1 using browser default settings)
A good surprise, the designs made with Times in very tiny sizes do look good: see #41 and #45.
The survey in itself has been quite a laborious task: spotting the font used is damn easy; but then, when you want to find the sizes used, you sometimes to go through a whole lot before finding what you want. The “style” of size-setting range from “0.65em/1.3em” to “10px/1.4em” via “13px/140%”. Very often, I didn’t even bother finding the size, that was just too tedious a task.
What’s Wrong with Verdana, then?
The anti-Verdana are right: it’s not available on every system. It is very often not present on Linux platforms and the replacement font is in majority Arial. The problem is that a 75%-reduced Verdana looks fine. An Arial doesn’t.
The real problem, then, really is the size. I found some time ago a good article about that in The Noodle Incident, from which I excerpted this below:
“So I want two things from a text sizing method: that it present my choice
across the main browsers, but still be resizeable to respect people’s needs
and different hardware.”
I think alike.
A Linux user is quite entitled to complain to see tiny characters. But somehow, the Web designer chose some fonts – because it suited his website design, main audience, etc. As far as he’s concerned, his task is to provide ways to resize the size of the text if the reader feels the need to increase it.
The Linux user (let’s carry on with this example) has then several ways to work around this issue:
- find Verdana somewhere;
- write a user stylesheet which will replace the designer’s one (just about its role: overriding the designer’s choices);
- resize the text.
I know this sounds terribly against accessible sites. The thing is the font problem is a never-ending story. Unless a universal font is created, both easy to read in small sizes and pleasing to the eye, no proper solution can be found but using Arial or Helvetica. But you know what? I don’t have Helvetica on my computer. That being said, Microsoft tried to create those fonts: they’re called Verdana and Georgia (by Matthew Carter & Tom Rickner). I can’t think of any similar success.
What’s Wrong with Arial, then?
For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Arial).
For the same x-height, everything (Typeset in Verdana).
There’s no need to be an expert to say that Verdana in the example above is much more legible than Arial because it’s wider for roughly the same x-height (l’œil, in French). By the way, it would have been just about the right place to use font-size-adjust, wouldn’t it?
