Verdana
Humanist sans, screen-optimised · shipped with Windows and macOS · rendering from your machine
Waterfall
Character set
Text, 14 / 17 / 20 px
Its reputation was earned in the years when it was used badly: set too large, set too wide, and set on pages that had nothing else going for them. None of that is the face's fault. Judged on the problem it was drawn to solve — legibility at sizes where other faces give up — it has still not been beaten by much.
Its reputation was earned in the years when it was used badly: set too large, set too wide, and set on pages that had nothing else going for them. None of that is the face's fault. Judged on the problem it was drawn to solve — legibility at sizes where other faces give up — it has still not been beaten by much.
Its reputation was earned in the years when it was used badly: set too large, set too wide, and set on pages that had nothing else going for them. None of that is the face's fault. Judged on the problem it was drawn to solve — legibility at sizes where other faces give up — it has still not been beaten by much.
Notes
Verdana is the sans-serif companion to Georgia, from the same designer and the same brief, and it solves the small-size problem more aggressively than any face that came after it. The x-height is very large, the counters are wide open, the spacing is loose, and the strokes are uniform. At eleven or twelve pixels, where a normally-proportioned sans closes up and the letters begin to merge, Verdana is still resolving into distinct shapes.
It also does the thing almost no other system face does: it distinguishes the capital I from the lowercase l, giving the capital serifs so the two cannot be confused. Combined with a numeral one that has a base, this makes it unexpectedly good for reference numbers, part codes and anything a reader has to transcribe by eye — a use case that has nothing to do with the decorative work it is usually blamed for.
The cost is width, and it is a large cost. Verdana is dramatically wider than the system sans stack at the same nominal size, so a column that holds sixty-six characters in Segoe UI will hold closer to fifty in Verdana. Set at sixteen pixels across a full-width page it looks enormous and slightly naive, which is precisely the impression most people have of it. Set at twelve in a dense table, it is the right answer.
The usual correction is to size it down rather than to reach for a different face: because the perceived size follows the x-height, Verdana at 14px reads about as large as the system sans at 16.
Practical
| Classification | Humanist sans-serif, screen-optimised |
|---|---|
| Designer | Matthew Carter, hinting by Tom Rickner, 1996 |
| Availability | Ships with Windows and macOS; DejaVu Sans is the usual Linux stand-in and is not metric-compatible |
| Distinguishes | Capital I from lowercase l, and 1 from both. Rare and useful |
| Comfortable at | 11–14px. Above 16 it starts to look oversized in body copy |
| Watch for | Set width — expect roughly 25% fewer characters per line than a normally-proportioned sans |
| Good for | Dense tables, captions, reference codes, small print, low-resolution displays |
Stack used on this page
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;
Geneva is the historical Apple relative and narrower; DejaVu Sans is what Linux systems generally have and is narrower still. Neither is metric-compatible, so a layout tuned to Verdana's width will not hold when it falls through. If the width matters, it has to be constrained by the container rather than assumed from the face.