I know I haven’t written much lately, but today I have something worth blogging about. It’s this discreet, short post from risingline.com about how fonts are displayed in Firefox. I’ve been having an issue for months and months and months with the way some fonts are displayed in Firefox. I’m working on a PC, and in Internet Explorer, the fonts appear perfectly smooth and legible, but in Firefox some of them appear jagged. It’s been driving me absolutely crazy because 1) I love Firefox and didn’t want to switch to IE, and 2) in my web design, I was shy about using certain fonts (like Helvetica, which I love) that might appear this way to the audience. (The latter is still a concern because I’m sure there are others like I was who don’t know how to solve this problem. But I’m hopeful that with enough talk about it this issue will go away.)

If you don’t want to visit the link above, the answer is really simple. Just right-click on your desktop and go to Properties. Click the tab that says Appearance, then click Effect. Check the box that says, “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts” and choose ClearType in the dropdown below.

In the spirit of my new found freedom of type choices, here’s a quick link displaying some popular logos created with Helvetica–though I warn you, I don’t think all of them are really Helvetica. Can you tell the difference? Speaking of, here’s another fun link…the Helvetica/Arial quiz. I took this a few months ago and got them all correct except for the words in all caps.

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