Two of the lesser known, or at least lesser used, browser-safe fonts out there are Lucida Grande and Lucida Sans Unicode, bundled with Mac and Windows operating systems, respectively. Like Verdana, they are humanist alternatives to the Grotesk and Neo-Grotesk Helvetica and Arial, and Lucida Grande is actually the font used by OS X, including Safari.
Lucida Grande
As with all humanist typefaces, these fonts allude to human handwriting in the construction of the letters, making the type as a whole more friendly and warm than something like Helvetica. Lucida Grande is based off of Lucida Sans Unicode, and they are almost completely identical; so using them both in a font family is universal across Macintosh and Windows operating systems. Lucida Sans Unicode is a tremendously large font containing characters for the Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets, among others.
If you are into humanist sans-serif typefaces on the web, these fonts are a great alternative to Verdana, if its a bit too wide for your taste.
This rounds out all of the sans-serif web safe fonts at your disposal. Arm yourself with knowledge about these typefaces and you will have no problem choosing the appropriate one for your next project. Serif fonts up next!
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But if you use Lucida Sans, instead of Lucida Sans Unicode, for Italic styling, you get a very attractive typeface that is very close to calligraphy.
Facebook use Tahoma for their non-Italic sans-serif text (in Windows browsers), but use Lucida Sans Italic for all their italic sans-serif text. It’s a great combination.
Paul,
While this may be the case, plain Lucida Sans does not come preloaded on any version of Windows I am aware of. Check out this list of fonts bundled with Windows for more info.
Thanks for the info!
Andy,
Hmmm… I have it on all my Windows machines. I’m not sure if that’s a function of XP and Vista, or whether it’s MS Office 2003.
So, I have both Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode (and also Lucida Sans Typewriter).
The font could have been bundled with any software on your computer, but to the best of my knowledge it is not bundled with the OS. Lucida Sans and Lucida Sans Unicode should be almost completely identical, the unicode version just contains all of the various alphabets and symbols.
Even though I do not have an italic version of Lucida on my computer, my browsers are still rendering italics normally, not the calligraphic style you are talking about though.
I will update the article, thanks for the heads up.
I’m hesitating to wonder whether we aren’t seeing the same italic font, Andy, and one man’s calligraphy is another man’s bending-sideways-writing. :-)
Just to tie together what Andy and Paul have been commenting, neither Lucida Grande nor Lucida Sans Unicode come with proper italics so when they are viewed in a browser the ‘italic’ is just a mechanically obliqued roman.
However Lucida Sans does (normally) ship with a proper italic. Lucida Sans comes preinstalled with Windows XP SP2, Vista, Office 2007 and Office 2004/Mac. See http://media.24ways.org/2007/17/fontmatrix.html
Thanks for the insight Richard, much appreciated.
Where can I find a symbol for the old weight pfund it looks like a u where the last downstroke continues upwards and across towards the left?
@Steen – Check Lucida Sans Unicode. Its got lots of silly stuff.