New fonts from Microsoft for web use
I came across a blog entry labelled The next big thing in online type. It got screenshots of the six new typefaces developed for the web that Microsoft is to ship with the next version of Windows and its other software products. So, is this interesting? Yes, if youre interested in web design. Because what this actually means is that you may, in a couple of months, be able to use other fonts than the so bleached Verdana, Arial, Georgia, and Times New Roman on the web. The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use while displaying code or commands.
Viewing web text on a Windows PC is typically not a pleasure since most people havent even heard of ClearType and the text rendering engine seems to suck in general. Compared to Mac OS X - where there is quite a few nice fonts that looks good, on the screen in general and on the web in specific, and where the text rendering engine seems to work brilliant - theres quite a difference. One of my favourites on the Mac is Lucida Grande, probably the most popular sans-serif on web pages aiming at a Mac user audience.
Unfortunately, these fonts are not to be released for free use so they may not end up on all platforms. But, still, they might do a lot of good since a majority of the people watching the web uses Microsofts products and while there already are quite a few nice fonts on the Mac you can just add a couple of more font names in your CSS and the web page will look a lot better for everyone. Nice.