Verdana
Verdana
Matthew Carter, 1996
Sans-serif · A website designed between 1998 and 2008.
Drawn for screens at a time when screens were 72 or 96 dots per inch and anti-aliasing was rare, so every letter was fitted to the pixel grid. Its very wide letterforms and large x-height made it the most readable option on a 1996 monitor by a wide margin. IKEA switching its catalogue from Futura to Verdana in 2009 produced a genuine international news story and a petition.
How to tell it apart
| Mistaken for | Which letters to check |
|---|---|
| Tahoma | Tahoma is Verdana's narrower sibling by the same designer, with tighter letter spacing. If it looks like Verdana but fits more words on a line, it is Tahoma. |
The facts
- Designed by
- Matthew Carter
- Released
- 1996
- Classification
- Sans-serif
- What it signals now
- A website designed between 1998 and 2008.
Where you have seen it
- Most of the web in the early 2000s
- IKEA's catalogues from 2009, controversially
Other typefaces from the 1990s
| Typeface | Year | Designer | What it signals |
|---|---|---|---|
| FF Meta | 1991 | Erik Spiekermann | The 1990s doing corporate identity properly. Warm, readable, slightly quirky. |
| Comic Sans | 1994 | Vincent Connare | A hospital notice, a village hall poster, or a joke about typography. |
| Georgia | 1996 | Matthew Carter | A blog, a newspaper website, or long-form reading on screen. |
This page describes the typeface rather than showing it. Displaying a specimen requires a licensed font file and almost none of these may be redistributed, so the descriptions name the letters to look at instead.
Common questions
- Who designed Verdana?
- Matthew Carter, in 1996.
- What is Verdana used for?
- A website designed between 1998 and 2008. You will have seen it on Most of the web in the early 2000s, IKEA's catalogues from 2009, controversially.
- What is the difference between Verdana and Tahoma?
- Tahoma is Verdana's narrower sibling by the same designer, with tighter letter spacing. If it looks like Verdana but fits more words on a line, it is Tahoma.
Related pages
- Typefaces from the 1990s 4 here
- Akzidenz-Grotesk H. Berthold AG, 1896
- Franklin Gothic Morris Fuller Benton, 1902
- Johnston Edward Johnston, 1916
- Futura Paul Renner, 1927
- Gill Sans Eric Gill, 1928
- Helvetica Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, 1957
- Univers Adrian Frutiger, 1957
- Optima Hermann Zapf, 1958
Sources
- Official vendor product documentation — At One Place