It took Matthew Carter two years to create these typefaces, and Microsoftgave his fonts away for free. In addition, the spacing between characters is much looser, makingit easier to scan quickly. Uppercase characters are a pixel tallerthan their lowercase counterparts when displayed at key screen sizes to improvereadability. Letter combinations such as fi, fl, and ff weredesigned clearly so they do not touch. They were designed with a larger x-height (thesize of ascenders, such as the letter d, and descenders, such as theletter g). The differences between these font families make up a primer on what featureswork for screen-based typography.

Matthew Carter's two fonts ( Verdana and Georgia) arebeautifully designed for web delivery. Microsoft took a leadership role inthis endeavor by hiring renowned type designer Matthew Carter (ITCGalliard, Snell Roundhand, Charter, and Bell CentennialВ—the font used inphone books) to develop two screen-based font families for them. Serifs (the slabs atthe ends of lines on each type character) improve readability when printed athigh resolution, but they actually interfere with readability on the screen.Italics are even more problematic and are almost illegible in many sizes and onmany platforms.ДЇor us to get a wider range of choices for type on the Web, fonts must bedesigned for the screen from the ground up. Letters often touch one another, making them hard toreadВ—especially in very small sizes (9 pt. Arialand Helvetica suck! They are 'ugly.' In fact, all the fonts that shipas default fonts on the various platforms are 'ugly' What makes themugly? Here's a short lesson in identifying the ugly factors.Дigital type is generally not well hinted (the uniform spacing betweenletters) for the screen. The trouble is, the basic font choices in browsers are bland at best. Web browsers have defaulted to using two typefaces:a serif font for standard text and a monospace font for code. Until now, most web publishers and designers have lived in a chocolate andvanilla typographical world.

Georgia font size 20