The Georgia® and Verdana® typefaces are part of an elite group of designs created specifically for on-screen use. Both are included in every major operating system and are among the most widely used fonts for Web content.
Designed with only two weights (regular and bold), plus complementary italics, Georgia and Verdana are relatively small families, which has limited their suitability for complicated documents or other applications requiring several levels of typographic hierarchy. With the release of Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro, this is no longer the case
The Georgia and Verdana typeface designs were commissioned originally by Microsoft to address the challenges of on-screen display. Matthew Carter designed both families, with TrueType® font production, from Monotype Imaging’s Tom Rickner. Georgia and Verdana were introduced in 1996 in Microsoft’s “Core fonts for the Web” font pack. Later, they were added to the Windows® Web font pack.
Georgia and Verdana share characteristics that offer outstanding legibility and readability: large x-heights, open counters, high contrast between the regular and bold weights, ample letter spacing, and character designs that help distinguish commonly confused letterforms.
Now, both families have been dramatically extended, thanks to a collaboration with Matthew Carter, David Berlow of The Font Bureau, and Steve Matteson and Tom Rickner of Monotype Imaging. The foursome worked to enable the families’ use for many new applications, including extended text formatting on websites and in print. “The new Pro series of Georgia and Verdana are being released at a time that seems particularly auspicious,” comments Carter. “The design of websites will certainly benefit, and I hope that designers who have long been familiar with Verdana and Georgia will take full advantage of the greater versatility of the Pro series, both on screen and in print.”
Berlow concurs, “The expanded and enhanced Georgia and Verdana families will appeal to many who publish in print and online. This expansion adds breadth for creative professionals who rely on these two workhorse font families.”
The new extended families also benefit from a variety of additional enhancements, including:
• Extensions to the character sets
• Enlarged kern-pair suites
• OpenType® format features for improved typographic output
Carter observes, “Georgia and Verdana were born into a generation of monitors that displayed binary bitmaps. Back then, pixels were either on or off; there was no anti-aliasing. This forced bold faces to be double the weight of the regulars, a big difference by the standards of conventional type families.” He adds, “Screen displays are subtler now. The new Pro series of Georgia and Verdana take advantage of the finer gradations of weight made possible by better rendering technologies in order to add light, semi-bold and black weights, none of which were possible 15 years ago.”
Rickner also hinted all the glyphs in the new releases, as he had done for the original releases. Hinting involves making minute adjustments to the font data to ensure legibility at a wide range of point sizes.
The new Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro families, with 20 designs each, offer everyone from casual users to professional designers a collection of fonts that provide optimum typographic performance in a wide variety of applications: six regular weights, each with complementary italics, plus a suite of condensed designs.
“The enhancements to the Georgia family are significant – especially in this new day and age of Web fonts,” says Matteson, the designer of Georgia Pro. He continues, “Georgia is wildly popular and robust as a serif text face for Web use. These new weights and styles add to the Web developer's palette for headlines, subheads, captions and pull quotes.” He adds, “While the original old style figures have always looked great for text, designers finally have the option to use lining figures where appropriate. I think the heavy condensed weights will prove particularly useful for subheadings in online periodicals.”
Both the Georgia and Verdana families benefit from an exceptionally large character set, allowing the setting of Pan-European languages, in addition to Cyrillic and Greek.
Additionally, the entire Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro families are available as Web fonts, from Fonts.com Web Fonts.