Comments

Jsnkc wrote on 4/15/2004, 1:06 PM
We usually just stick with Arial, as big of a pt. size as you can get away with becasue it normally is really hard to read in web videos, especially highly compressed ones.
ClipMan wrote on 4/15/2004, 3:36 PM
...arial/arial black....
riredale wrote on 4/15/2004, 3:40 PM
For some reason I've gotten very fond of a font called "Pooh." It looks like a hand-lettered Arial. Very easy to read.

Do a Google search for "Pooh font."
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/15/2004, 7:51 PM
A font that is absent of any fine lines or hard rounded edges. Serifs are out.
one big thing in getting fonts to look good is to have less contrast than you normally would. Low contrast usually means cleaner encodes than high contrast.
rmack350 wrote on 4/15/2004, 11:10 PM
I recently found a nice way to demonstrate how colors will render to DV.

Take some sample text and set a color keyframe at the beginning and end. Change the color of the text so that you'll see a gradual change over time. Then render to a new track.

It just demonstrates that some colors are better than others. Drives the point home. I had found that really dense blues are just awful after rendering. And by rendering to a new track you can check the color value on the original generated media.

Helps you avoid stubornly and futilely working on your text to try to make a bad color choice look better.

Rob Mack
TorS wrote on 4/15/2004, 11:30 PM
The smaller the text, the more important it is to avoid ”difficult” fonts. Trebuchet and Verdana are two non-serif fonts that are optimised for web pages (issued free by Microsoft). They offer a variation to the much-used Arial (or Helvetica, as it was called before it was MSed). Impact is a great font that does what the name promises and is a good alternative to Arial Black (which is a great font. too). Another good MS-distributed font is Andale Mono.
I often pull the white down to what you might call off-white (RGB between 215 and 225). That reduces glare and contrast but maintains readability on a variety of backgrounds.

Here’s a good article by Christina Fox about shooting for the web

Tor
barleycorn wrote on 4/16/2004, 8:31 AM
One doesn't know how much this matters to you (i.e. how much trouble you're prepared to go to) but here are a couple of general rules:

1. Ignore the advice about typefaces given in a forum such as this unless you're pretty sure it's coming from a design specialist. For some reason all kinds of people who know next to nothing about typography and design will feel free to contribute, even though they wouldn't dream of doing so on any other subject. You would usually be much better off finding a typography forum and asking about typefaces for use at very low resolution.

2. Be prepared to spend money. Beginners are happy to use whatever they happen to find dumped on their computers with the operating system or application software but these wouldn't begin to satisfy anyone serious about type. What's missing? Primarily, small caps (all small caps can often be far more legible than all uppercase in video), old style figures (more of a stylistic matter), a range of weights (i.e. not just regular and bold), and optical variants (fonts designed for use at particular sizes).

Essentially there are two imperatives when choosing a typeface: legibility and stylistic appositeness. Getting the latter right is (like most design skills) a combination of knowledge, talent and experience; the only shortcut to finding the right font is asking a designer for help. The former is partly the application of a similar combination of skills (I have to say that 'stick with Arial' seems a very long way wide of the mark to me) but there are of course a few more-or-less immutable rules, particularly if one is working in a low resolution context.

Above all, because there is simply no room for any detail, there's no point choosing a typeface where great detail is absolutely integral to the design. That means 'modern', very highly-contrasted faces (Bodoni or Didot for example) are usually out, as are most calligraphic scripts. Contrary to some advice, one can use serif faces as long as they're nearer to the 'slab serif' rather than 'unbracketed serif' end of the scale. I would also highly recommend Adobe's Multiple Master fonts or their more recent OpenType opticals: by misusing optical sizes - using a face designed for small point sizes at a much larger size - several fonts that would otherwise be non-starters are perfectly useable.

If you have to stick with what is effectively free, Tor is right to refer you to some of Microsoft's 'Core Fonts for the Web' (Adobe and FontFont also have fonts optimised for use on screen though they're not free). Though most distinguished at small point sizes (as they were designed to be), fonts like Verdana and Georgia are certainly highly legible. Whether they'd be appropriate for your subjects I obviously couldn't say. Otherwise it's a question of experimenting with whatever you've got.