Trying to make websites look the same for everybody does nothing but hold back the possibilities of web design, and doing something like putting Arial before Helvetica is one of the first steps down that road.

Certain browsers (mostly ones that start with an 'I' and end in an 'nternet Explorer') are not capable of the kinds of things that modern browsers are. It's time to let go of that belief, though. So what's the point in even using a font stack if you're going to start it out with a font that nearly everybody has? I can't really see any benefit, unless the people who design these sites come from the school of thought that says that websites need to look exactly the same in every browser for every user. Not all users have the font that the designer wants them to see, so backups are put in place. Not everybody has Helvetica, though, and that's the whole point of font stacks. Okay maybe not everybody, people might have it disabled or something, but it's safe to say that the majority of internet users have Arial on their computers. For example, here's a font stack that lists Helvetica as the primary font, Arial as a substitute font and a generic sans-serif font as a last resort: font-family: 'Helvetica', 'Arial', sans-serif The ProblemĪs you can see, font stacks give designers a great way to choose a preferred font and then give users who don't have that font some alternative version. Basically, it's a line in a CSS file that lists what font the designer wants the user to see, followed by an ordered list of alternatives in case the user doesn't have that font on their system. Font choice is just as important as any other design element in a video game: would Candy Crush Saga (King, iOS/Android/Windows Phone/Browser, 2012) make as effective a message without this 'delicious' chunky script font Arial cannot aid the atmosphere of your game unless you are making a game about the history of typography.

About Font Stacksįor those of you who don't know, a font stack is a common practice in web design. I was (and still am) really confused by this. I started to look into it more and found that many of these sites put Arial before Helvetica in their font stacks. One thing that I started to notice, though, was that a lot of websites used Arial as their primary font. I became obsessed with identifying the type face in the wild. It had a really big impact on the way that I look at the world.

Arial font stack