Typographic Services by Symbiotic Desing in Sioux Falls

Web Page Typography
The Symbiotic Design™ web site encourages professionals and amatuers alike to design web pages with alternate font sets. The problem associated with including font specific tags to personalize web pages is that they are not usually installed on everyone's sytems, especially since the world wide web is a network of computers on different platforms. Since most different computer platforms use a different font system, even embedding the fonts within a web page requires imbedding a couple of font formats for different platforms. Even Windows and Macintosh systems use a different Postscript or True Type format, despite the fact that they are essentially the same thing. This is not the end of the challenges placed on the page designer, either.

There are so many different fonts that no one will ever have them all installed on thier system. So if you find a font that you like, you still may not want to use it on your web pages as the specified typeface unless it is a broadly used and distributed font. And unless you want to alienate one computer platform base or another, you should check to see if it is distributed with or available on both of the major platforms, Windows and Macintosh. Linux based systems can read and use Windows fonts, this this means that the broad base of the computing platforms is covered. Other systems, such as the Classic Amiga, use bitmapped fonts with the same name and use Windows Postscript fonts for scalable fonts. However, the names that are used by other systems, like bitmap fonts, may not always look like the fonts you would expect to see. So for the web page designer, the challenges to using the <font> tag can be many.

Still, the default font for almost any browser is a poor choice, Times. This was never meant as a screen font, as it's characters include fancy empelishments which make the type hard to read in a screen resolution. Times was meant for print, to fancy up the type style. It also lends a professional and conservative quality to works printed with Times. But for the web, it sucks. It is a poor excuse for a font face at any screen resolution. Why IE and Netscape developers have decided to use that particular font as the default font for the world wide web browsers is beyond me. Certainly laziness must have a great deal to do with it. Though it is actually a standard typeface which has been proliferated world wide, there are many more standard fonts which are as well distributed and make for much more ledgible copy, especially when you consider screen resolutions.

It's particularly annoying to come up on a page that uses the default font to display content text. Stick Times in an <h1> header tag and it gets so big that it is easily read and even the fancy embelishments look ok. But for content copy at screen resolution, it only hampers the reader's progress. A web page author who does not specify a more legible font for screen resolution content text is just as lazy as the browser developers. More readable fonts which enjoy the same popularity as the Times typeface include Helvetica, Arial and Geneva. Still, this is a very limited selection of fonts which are simple and somewhat less than striking.

In the future, Symbiotic Design™ will be incorporating the free web fonts from Fontcraft's Scriptorium archive into it's web layout. While we chose not to embed our fonts into our web pages, you can download this set of web fonts from the Scriptorium, or get them from us below. These fonts were designed as display fonts that suit the format of the world wide web well. Included in each archive are Divona, Sirona, Divona and Onuava fonts which have enjoyed wide distribution through the Scriptorium over the years in Fontcraft's effort to introduce choice and style to the web design community.

Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Windows.
Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Macintosh.

Symbiotic Design™ has studied the fonts available to users of Windows and Macintosh products and has found that the following font face families are most commonly available:

Windows operating systems:
Arial
Comic Sans MS
Courier New
Georgia
Impact
Lucidia
Microsoft Sans Serif
Palatino Linotype
Tahoma
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Webdings
WingDings

Macintosh operating systems:
Arial
Charcoal
Chicago
Comic Sans MS
Courier
Courier New
Gadget
Geneva
Helvetica
Hoefler Text
Impact
Monaco
New York
Palatino
Sand
Skia
Symbol
Techno
Textile
Times
Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS
Verdana
Webdings

Widely distributed free fonts:
Andale Mono
- courtesy of Microsoft.
[Win 95/98/NT/2000/Me/xp]
[Win 3.1/3.11 (Monotype.com)]
[Macintosh]

Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS Bold
- courtesy of Microsoft.
[Win 95/98/NT/2000/Me/xp]
[Win 3.1/3.11]
[Macintosh]

Divona
- coutesy of Fontcraft
(part of the Divona, Onuava, Sirona archive bundle). *
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Windows]
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Macintosh]

Georgia, Georgia Bold, Georgia Italic, Georgia Bold Italic
- courtesy of Microsoft.
[Win 95/98/NT/2000/Me/xp]
[Win 3.1/3.11]
[Macintosh]

Impact
- courtesy of Microsoft.

Onuava
- coutesy of Fontcraft
(part of the Divona, Onuava, Sirona archive bundle). *
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Windows]
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Macintosh]

Sirona
- coutesy of Fontcraft
(part of the Divona, Onuava, Sirona archive bundle). *
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Windows]
[Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Macintosh]

Tahoma
- courtesy of Microsoft.

Trebuchet MS
- courtesy of Microsoft.

Verdana
- courtesy of Microsoft.

Webdings (Webdings)
- courtesy of Microsoft.

* Font is a part of Fontcraft's free webfonts distribution which we will be employing in SymbioticDesign.com web page typography:
Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Windows (Divona, Onuava, Sirona bundle).
Fontcraft's Web Fonts for Macintosh (Divona, Onuava, Sirona bundle).

Most of the freeware Microsoft fonts are already used within the website, presently.

Please keep an eye on this area in the coming months for more freeware fonts without the ridiculous pop-up ad attacks from most freeware font sites.