John D. Berry | Microsoft Typography

December 2009

 

Ikea’s choice of Verdana as its new corporate typeface excited an unprecedented amount of public reaction (mostly against). And it wasn’t limited to the small but vocal online type community; front-page articles appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian, as well as on Time.com. What’s surprising is that any question of typo­graphic design would catch the attention of the general public. It’s a good sign, along with the movie Helvetica, that fonts have become part of the public awareness, at last.

 

This seems like a good time to tell people about Verdana, where it came from, why it was created, what its strengths are, and why the Verdana font family is in the process of being expanded now.

 

This is not about Ikea’s design decisions. We’ll leave that subject to the debaters.

 

Verdana was designed in the 1990s for Microsoft, developed specifically as a typeface for reading onscreen. The designer, Matthew Carter, has long experience of virtually every kind of typeface technology, and he brought that to bear on designing Verdana. Since text on a computer screen appears, of necessity, at pretty coarse resolution, the outlines of the letters have to be adapted somehow when rendering them at small sizes; there simply aren’t enough pixels available to reproduce the outline shapes perfectly. That’s where the art and craft of designing screen fonts comes in: making the most of those extreme limitations. In what was at the time a revolutionary turnabout, Carter first designed bitmapped letters for each of the target sizes, positioning pixels to get the most legible shapes he could; then he drew the outlines for the higher-resolution letters, based on the shapes of the lo-res bitmaps. Tom Rickner, a wizard of digital font technology, then created the “hints” that would tell the font software exactly how to distort the outlines at a particular size, when drawing a character on the screen, in order to achieve the ideal bitmap at that size.

 

One of the things that make Verdana legible onscreen, compared with a lot of other typefaces, is the generous space around the characters. There’s always a tendency among web designers to try to cram in as much material as possible in the space available, but that works against clarity and legibility. Without enough space between the letters, they all tend to run together. We’ve all seen this, far too frequently, on our computer screens. The clear, open shapes of Verdana’s letters can vary quite a bit from size to size at small text sizes onscreen, but one thing they have in common is that they’ve been given enough space to breathe.

 

Although Verdana was meant primarily for onscreen reading, it works surprisingly well in print. It’s a simple, clean, unpretentious sans serif type­face, easy to read. Its letter forms are “open,” meaning that the white spaces inside the letters are large and the openings (such as the open side of the “c”) are wide. In a 2005 study of legibility, comparing six commonly used text fonts, Verdana (especially in combination with Microsoft’s ClearType technology) was found to be the most legible.

 

One of the reasons Ikea chose Verdana seems to have been that it works across quite a lot of languages and scripts. The basic fonts include Greek and Cyrillic alongside the extended Latin alphabet; and Microsoft’s Japanese typeface Meiryo is based on Verdana, with the romaji (Latin letters) being essentially slightly revised and sharpened versions of Verdana’s designs.

 

Microsoft is not usually thought of as a font company. But over the past 15 years or so, Microsoft has commissioned several new families of type­faces for its products, especially digital fonts designed to bridge the gap between paper and screen, taking advantage of each new develop­ment in font and display technology. Verdana and Georgia were among the first; more recent releases have included the Microsoft ClearType font collection (Calibri, Cambria, Consolas, Candara, Constantia, Corbel; and, simul­taneously, Meiryo) and the elaborately variable display font Gabriola (with its rich collection of calligraphic Greek ligatures, among other hidden gems).

 

The current expansion of the Verdana and Georgia families is being done by Ascender Corporation, working with David Berlow of the Font Bureau and with the original designer, Matthew Carter. This project will add more weights and widths to both type families, giving graphic designers a broader palette of typographic choices. The hope is that these will prove useful especially in publications, and that they may become workhorses of editorial design for both paper and screen.