Revised Font Stack

February 5, 2010

A Way Back just posted a really great article on font stacks this morning and it’s worth your time to read. I talk about font stacks a bit in the book, and this article gives some good advice on some new combinations of fonts.

As you know from the book, constructing a good font stack lets you get around the limited number of “web-safe” fonts by providing sensible, similar fallbacks for your fonts.

I’ve selected 10 popular typefaces, serif and sans-serif, each from the survey. By considering the font-share % statistics in the following table, we can try some other typefaces, but with care.

I particularly enjoyed the “Facebook” font stack.

"Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Sans", Verdana, Tahoma, sans-serif;

The article is well-written and points out some interesting small details, including some statistics on the availability of fonts on various operating systems, which you can use to your advantage when creating your own stacks.

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