Stuart Brown of Modern Life is Rubbish published an interesting article a couple days ago on the fonts used in Web 2.0 companies’ logotypes, including such gems as Interstate and Frutiger (I love those fonts). Unfortunately, he didn’t go into any detail about the fonts used throughout the rest of the site. Since you’ll spend 99% of your time staring at a website’s body text, it’s pretty important to know what’s a good font to use. You may be surprised by some of the results, so read on!

From the Modern Life list: 43Things.com uses Verdana and Courier New. Ning.com uses Georgia for accent text, and Arial for body text. Popurls.com uses Lucida Grande, Arial for lists, and Trebuchet MS for forms. Techcrunch uses Verdana for body text, and Tahoma for heading text. 9Rules uses Trebuchet MS and Verdana for titles, Lucida Grande for body text, and Trebuchet MS for ads. Bloglines uses Verdana, with the occasional mix-in of Trebuchet MS. 37Signals uses Verdana, with small bits of Georgia and Lucida Grande. (Verdana is specified as the first font in one font-family declaration at one point in 37Signals’ CSS with Lucida Grande behind it. I wonder if this is a bug). Tailrank uses Verdana with Arial for links (why?). Rollyo uses Verdana and Helvetica.

Which means: Verdana - 7 Sites Courier New - 1 Site Arial - 3 Sites Georgia - 2 Sites Lucida Grande - 3 Sites Trebuchet MS - 3 Sites Tahoma - 2 Sites Helvetica - 1 Site