The first fonts on the internet

At the time, users and designers alike only had access to a small selection of ‘web-safe’ fonts – typefaces that were pre-installed on computers.

This meant that a webpage could display the fonts without needing to substitute them. The most common fonts used on the early internet were Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia, and Courier New. The constraint of only using web-safe fonts shaped the visual language of early websites, where pages were dominated by system fonts – the designs of which were often rendered in low resolution on CRT monitors. Serif fonts like Times New Roman were initially common, reflecting their dominance in print, but they quickly proved difficult to read on pixel-based screens. And let’s not forget, there weren’t many pixels to be playing with back then. As such, sans serifs became more popular, offering cleaner shapes that held up better at small sizes and low resolutions.

To ensure more people had better access to digitally-legible fonts (in a wider range of styles too) in 1996, Microsoft launch their initiative ‘Core fonts for the Web’, releasing a set of fonts that – under EULA – made them freely usable. The set included Arial, Courier New, Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Impact, Georgia, Trebuchet, Webdings and Verdana. All of which, you can agree, are absolute classics, and the remanence of their significance lasted for decades (lest we forget old school meme culture) or still continues to hold cultural relevance. Arial, for example, is everywhere on the internet, and occupies the title of what we consider ‘default’ in contemporary visual language. Just look at Brat!

Anyway, these fonts signalled the improvement of screens, and the start of type design that was digital-first. This meant designers engineered typefaces with larger x-heights, wider spacing, and simplified details. These typefaces marked an early shift toward considering the web as its own typographic space, rather than a direct extension of print. Despite these developments, however, real typographic freedom on the internet was limited for years and years, which led designers to resort to workarounds, such as embedding text in images or using Flash, to achieve a desired look. These solutions were fragile, inaccessible, and difficult to maintain, but they highlighted a growing demand for more expressive web typography.

The turning point came with the introduction of webfont technologies in the late 2000s, particularly with the adoption of CSS @font-face – which allowed users have a custom typeface to display text – and the rise of services like Google Fonts. For the first time, designers could reliably use custom typefaces online without relying on system defaults. The web moved from a handful of safe choices to a near-infinite typographic space but, through these restrictions, it pushed the development of digital type considerably.

So yeah, those are first fonts on the internet. It perhaps didn’t seem like too much of a big deal at the time, but it’s so interesting how these seemingly insignificant decisions have led to the aesthetic of visual culture today (especially with early-internet nostalgia at an all-time high). So often we end up returning to the basics, or what we deem the ‘default’, so it’s a good thing that – in this case – the default is so captivating.

Fun bonus fact, Digi Grotesk by Dr. Rudolf Hell is widely considered the first digital font, and it was designed all the way back in 1968. It’s a bitmap font, and Dr Rudolf Hell (crazy name FYI) designed it for his Digiset CRT phototypesetting machine.