why is helvetica neue bold on my browser

On T-shirts, in banners, on posters, on Macs. After speaking with a few bigger startups, I got them to at least change their websites and remove it from their list.Īnd don't misunderstand me please : Helvetica Neue is great it's a beatiful font. Most designers and developers who primarily work on Macs are simply not aware of this, and took it as a quasi-standard. One of the worst parts in this is that most people are dumbfounded when confronted with this. Please help in stopping this from spreading, use web-safe fonts as default, instead of licensed OS specific fonts that have a tremendous history of displaying wrongly. And it breaks the functionality that Twitter Bootstrap is promising - beautiful front-end sites across the board, and not only on Macs. I would understand if this was a specific website with some corporate design guidelines that would cost millions to change but it isn't so. We are getting back to 'browser detection' ages. Even Twitter adds a 'ms-windows' class nowadays to its body, to override Helvetica Neue with Arial ( and later on changed to Gotham as we know ). There are even plugins created to automatically alter pages and replace Helvetica Neue with web-safe fonts, that's how bad the situation has become. I personally would expect the default fonts to be chosen so they display safely across the OSes, which most do - except Helvetica Neue. But Twitter Bootstrap sets the web standards with style choices, and the decision that was made early on was to use a non web-safe font as the default font. Is this issue limited to Twitter Bootstrap? No, this is a font issue. It's not possible to 'fix' this, by overwriting this font and it's not possible to patch it, as this font is not easily downloadable, and has literally hundreds of different versions which all display horribly and if it's not found, it will default back to the closest font in the family - try them yourself on your website : It's not possible to get rid of this font in those versions. Rendering professional websites really ugly. in recent Windows versions then Helvetica Neue is rendered with a non-web Bold version. If a version of Helvetica Neue is installed on a non-Mac OS, like e.g. But it uses Helvetica Neue as the default font, which is neither a web font, nor free ( ), nor easily install-able ( or even easily removable ), and simply displays horribly in many many circumstances doesn't distinguish many times between font-weights, doesn't kern well, and is not easily fixable by even experienced users unless hardcoded and replaced with another font.ĭue to this design decision and the popularity of Twitter Bootstrap a lot of websites on the web have adapted in using 'Helvetica Neue' as the primary font, with fallbacks to Helvetica, Arial and sans-serif. Twitter bootstrap is the most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web.

Why is helvetica neue bold on my browser