Most popular web fonts of 2012

My guess is that sans wins because many sites are using a sans web font for headlines and Georgia for copy. And because sans seems to be more popular for corporate identities right now.

I would venture to say the vast majority of sites use a sans for body copy. The common knowledge is that sans are more legible at low resolutions.

Having been the one who compiled the list, I concur with a lot of the above comments.

Mind you, when I look at the next 10 or 20 most popular typefaces on WebINK, there are plenty of serif faces cropping up—though still less than half of that next group.

What and where are the new web serifs on fonts.com? Are they the same ones MT developed for e-readers? I tried finding them on Fonts.com but Monotype is still incapable of promoting anything made by a living member of their type team.

Thanks for the link! I didn’t realize that they had finally released the entire series.

Completely agree with David that there are many "just converted" web fonts and not enough tailored designs.

In general, converted serif fonts will not look good for body text on the web, unless you use then bigger than 20px. And web designers does not like to set the body text so big (just in case the webfonts fail to load and the fallback font is shown)

Tailored designs will do look good when set at standard sizes (13 to 16px range), and they can become pretty popular pretty fast. For example Even's Merriweather and Sol's Bitter. Both are ranking pretty high on the GWF stats, having about 53 million views per week, each one.

Just "converting" is fast... while tailoring require extra work. So I applaud anyone taking the time and doing the extra work to tailor new webfonts.

The e-text fonts are a good step in the right direction, however to me, they looks like a halfway optimization. Why?
Because when set at 16px the standard MT Baskerville will produce a 7 pixels x-height.
eText Baskerville will increase it only by 1, producing a timid 8 pixel x-height.
While most tailored web fonts from the top foundries (Webtype, H&FJ, Typoteque, etc..) will produce a 9 pixels x-height, that seems to be the "de facto" standard.

Of course there more to it than making the fonts look bigger, but of all the optimizations (spacing, contrast, hinting, etc) that seems to be the more noticeable one. Or the one that makes the bigger difference.

Libre Baskerville (our tailored web version of ATF Baskerville) will also produce a 9 pixels x-height. And it's becoming popular pretty fast. The stats shows that it was requested 16 million times just last week, at it's increasing by 36% each week. Being among some of the fastest growing fonts on the directory.

In conclusion, I believe that there are still room for Serif fonts to become popular on the web, but they will need to be tailored for this new medium.

Because of the successful adoption of Libre Baskerville, we also have been working on Libre Caslon Text and Display, tailoring a Caslon for body web text, and another one for headers.

David:

...most unbullshitic things about masters for small sizes is that they appear larger small and appear confused large...

I understand -- and of course agree with -- the first observation, but am wondering what you mean by 'appear confused large'?

A sample of an extreme optimization, Petit Formal Script is a formal script that can be used as small as 14px


And will look like a horse if used big

inherent horsiness of text-optimized type used at display sizes

Or the awkwardness of a Clydesdale in a box designed for an Arabian? I thought that might be what David was angling at, but wasn't sure if he was referring to the look of small size-specific type scaled to display size, or suggesting something about its readability.

> a site that has not a single serif typeface designed for the web

That is not quite literally true. We have a few of those, as well as a bunch more that were designed for both screen and print, and superhinted for screen use.

That said, David Berlow’s approach to original typefaces for screen use has produced fabulous results.