All web designers have had to explain to a client or colleague the “web-safe font” problem. For the first 2 or 3 years that I designed sites, I basically rotated between Arial and Times when it came time to choose a font for a new design. Around 1999 or 2000 Verdana also became popular as a substitute to Arial.

If you are working on a site design and are tired of the same old fonts, you may find the following list useful. It’s not huge, but these are web-safe fonts (i.e. fonts that will show up correctly on most if not all operating systems) with their PC and Mac names:

PC Font Name
Mac Font Name

• Arial, Arial, Helvetica
• Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget
• Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS
• Courier New, Courier New, Courier
• Georgia, Georgia
• Impact, Impact, Charcoal
• Lucida Console, Monaco
• Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande
• Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino
• Tahoma, Geneva
• Times New Roman, Times
• Trebuchet MS, Helvetica
• Verdana, Verdana, Geneva
• MS Sans Serif, Geneva
• MS Serif, New York