W hen we began to look at Fonts on the Web in 1995, we realized there were two main problems. Few existing fonts were built to the standard needed to display well on a screen – and none that designers could be sure would be on every reader’s machine. And there was no technology to allow fonts of that quality to be tied to documents without leaving them wide open to piracy on a huge scale.
Microsoft had already built the most screen-readable fonts in the world, in the shape of the core fonts for Windows – Times New Roman, Arial and Courier. Even Adobe, at that time our bitterest foe in the “PostScript versus TrueType” Font Wars, conceded that.
No-one had ever put that much time, energy, and money into pushing TrueType font hinting technology to its limits. Hinting, we found, was absolutely essential to help any font rasterizer make the critical decisions needed to display great type at the comparatively low resolution of a computer screen.
Not Good Enough
The Windows core fonts were good, but still not good enough. Like most fonts, they had evolved from a history of printing on paper. No-one had ever designed fonts from scratch with optimizations for the screen in mind.
I met leading font designer Matthew Carter at the Seybold Publishing Conference in Boston in Spring 1995.
I asked him if he could design two new typefaces from scratch, for reading long passages of text on screen? Would this approach produce a marked improvement in screen readability?
The rest is history. The two fonts were named Verdana (a sans serif face) and Georgia (a serif).
(Photo: D T & G Typography)
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When a designer like Matthew creates a font for a customer, they normally retain copyright. But we wanted freedom to do whatever we wanted with the new faces, so we purchased the designs outright.
We wanted to “seed” the Web with the new faces, so designers could be certain they’d be on every computer.
“We wanted freedom to do whatever we wanted with the new faces...”
We combined them with the Windows core fonts into a Web Font Pack, and shipped them first with Internet Explorer, then Windows and Office. We made Macintosh versions. We put the whole Webfont pack up on the Microsoft Typography website for free download by anyone.
Unfortunately, that particular approach turned out to be a double-edged sword...
When Open Source operating systems appeared, we found some of our new competitors were circumventing the license agreement, which made the fonts free to end-users only.
They were simply including a link to our Webfont pack in their initial setup routine – in effect, “stealing” faces we’d spent a lot of time and money developing, to use as their own core OS fonts!
We’ve since been criticized for removing the free Webfont pack download. We’d have preferred to keep it up forever; but we had no choice, once this abuse was uncovered.
Our next task was to make it possible for designers to use other, commercial fonts on the Web, and for that we turned to a piece of technology Microsoft had originally developed for Microsoft Word...