For screen display, like presentations and websites, the A and B lists are fine. If you’re limited to system fonts, consult this chart and choose wisely.

In the pages following, I suggest professional alternatives to the most common system fonts. My official advice remains the same: professional writers should use professional fonts. In the long term, a diet of system fonts can be harmful to your health. WARNING This chart is offered only as a harm-reduction device. For instance, please don’t adopt the slogan “A Design Firm Unlike Any Other” and then set it in Helvetica. Not every typography project demands novelty. Because these fonts are included with billions of computers, they’re used all the time. See the difference?Īll system fonts are overexposed. But Georgia was optimized for the screen Miller was optimized for print. In basic appearance, they’re similar. Screen-optimized fonts look clunky on the printed page.Ĭompare the two fonts above. This comes at the cost of design details, which have been sanded off because they don’t reproduce well on screen (e.g., Georgia, Verdana, Cambria, and Calibri). Many system fonts have been optimized for the screen, not print.

In one square inch, an LCD screen that displays 100 dots per inch has less than 3% of the resolution of a laser printer with 600 dots per inch, so rendering a font accurately is much more difficult. I won’t name names, but my least favorite rhymes with Barial. The Windows and Mac OS libraries have improved, but they’re still minefields of awful fonts. In printed documents they present three problems. System fonts are the fonts already installed on your computer. Athelas features four weights and about 800 characters per weight, including small caps, discretionary ligatures, fractions, a complete range of numerals for every use and a set of ornaments and arrows.System fonts Avoid if you can, choose wisely if you can’t Although inspired in British literature, this typeface respects the cultural values behind different languages, where diacritic marks have an utterly important role. Athelas has a large character set that covers most of the languages that use the Latin script. Athelas shows its best side in finely crafted book editions and good printing conditions. It is also intended to take advantage of the great advances and technical developments made in offset printing. Athelas takes full advantage of the typographic silence, that white space in the margins, between the columns, the lines, the words, the lettershapes and finally, within the characters themselves. An attempt to go back towards the beauty of fine book printing, inspired in Britain's literary classics.

Athelas font