With more and more options for web fonts becoming available to us web designers, it’s easy to get carried away or overwhelmed by the staggering choices of beautiful fonts we can put in our websites. But it’s important not to forget that the default web fonts can be beautiful too.

While it’s very exciting that we can put Lobster and whatnot into our websites, the default fonts on browsers were chosen for a reason — they work. And well. They were chosen for readability and availability. Arial and Georgia are some of the fonts found on every single operating system, and that’s one reason they’re used so widely in web design.

I’ve been finding myself spoilt for choice over on Typekit, my preferred web font delivery service. I’ve changed the body fonts several times over the last few weeks, unable to land on one I was happy with. I got there eventually, but as I’ve previously mentioned, it doesn’t hurt to turn off the web fonts and see what fallbacks look best. When I was redesigning, for a long time I stuck with Georgia — it’s easy to read, it’s on every modern computer, hell it looks gorgeous! (I changed to a different font, as you can see — but you get the idea) Not so long ago, I posted this picture, showing off the fact that with a little care and time, and a lot of typographic theory, even Arial can make for an astoundingly beautiful font:

Arial can be pretty too!

Hopefully I’m not alone in the “I think web fonts are underrated” club. If you think otherwise, do let me know!