Fonts are one of the most important building blocks in design and sooner or later you get fed up with the traditional Verdana, Arial, and Helvetica fonts. While there is nothing wrong with Verdana, Arial, and Helvetica – they are three of the safest fonts – it gets boring if you only use these. On the other hand, if you use a rare font which users don't have on their system, this is also unprofessional because you have no control over the mess the user will see in their browser. That is why the so called web safe fonts have been designed.

How Safe Are Web Safe Fonts

Web safe fonts are fonts that look good on screen and are relatively popular, so you can safely assume that your visitors will have this font on their system. Very often these fonts come with the operating system itself, so users have them installed by default. Still, there is no guarantee that the fonts you use will be installed on your users' computers.

Additionally, even if the font is installed on your users' computers, many of these fonts look good only with particular font sizes. For instance, some fonts are good at sizes such as 10 or 12 pixels (i.e. body text), while with larger or smaller font sizes they either look distorted or are unreadable.

After all these clarifications, which were necessary so that you know you should take any lists of web safe fonts with a grain of salt, let's see which fonts made it to the list.

21 Stunning Web Safe Fonts for You to Use

Here are 21 stunning web safe fonts, which are either widely available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, or have decent substitutes. If you like one - simply copy the CSS code found in the blue box and use it yourself.

Serif

font-family:"Georgia", serif;

font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', 'Book Antiqua', Palatino, serif;

font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;

font-family: 'MS Serif', 'New York', sans-serif;

font-family: Garamond, serif;

font-family: 'Bookman Old Style', serif;

Sans-Serif

font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-family: 'Arial Black', Gadget, sans-serif;

font-family: 'Arial Narrow', sans-serif;

font-family: Symbol, sans-serif;

font-family: Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif;

font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif;

font-family: Century Gothic, sans-serif;

font-family: 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif;

font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Helvetica, sans-serif;

font-family: 'MS Sans Serif', Geneva, sans-serif;

Monospace

font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;

font-family: Courier, monospace;

font-family: 'Lucida Console', Monaco, monospace;

Cursive

font-family: 'Comic Sans MS', cursive;

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