Forget about using fonts the way you do when you’re printing or creating image files in Photoshop. That’s not how typography works on Web pages. A Web page gets its fonts from the user’s hard drive. The fonts on your own hard drive are not the same as the fonts on any other person’s hard drive!
A common mistake made by beginners: They specify fonts in the Web page; they see those fonts on their computer and they look great; then later they see the Web page on another person’s computer and it looks terrible. Why? That other person does not have those fonts.
It’s not a good idea to get creative with fonts on your Web pages. If you stick to the three specs above, or something quite similar, your pages will look equally good for all your users, regardless of the operating system they use.
Which fonts are most common?
