Helvetica on Windows
I like Helvetica. It’s a nice san-serif and has its place in many design projects (not as a tramp stamp, though). However, Helvetica looks really bad when rendered in web pages in Windows unless you’re above 18-pt. or so. The only browser where it looks good, of course, is in Safari, because it uses the Mac method of font smoothing. And apparently Macs are the only computers capable of properly rendering Helvetica. Keep this in mind next time you decide to use Helvetica as body type for a web project…
Here’s my blog with Helvetica on Windows 7 in Chrome (click for larger example):
This is 13-pt. The kerning/tracking is wacky and all over the place, and the font smoothing is very uneven and unattractive.
So, I find myself constantly installing and uninstalling Helvetica on my system; installing when I need it for working on a project, and uninstalling when I’m done because it looks like crap in web pages.
