Arial has been around a very long time but Web 2.0 returned Arial back to its glory days and It spread like a virus through the typographic landscape.

But now, Lucida (Grande) is the new Arial. Lucida is now everywhere, a side effect of Mac’s success.

Lucida Grande

Lucida Grande is a humanist sans-serif typeface included with the Mac OS X. It is currently used throughout the Mac OS X user interface, as well as in Safari on Windows.

As with all humanist typefaces, these fonts allude to human handwriting in the construction of the letters, making the type as a whole more friendly and warm than something like Arial or Helvetica.

Some of the big sites like Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, Hulu, and Techcrunch and many others are already using Lucida. And well, I too am using Lucida for this (qelix.com) website.

Using it on your website

Lucida Grande is a great font to use in websites, but it doesn’t come standard with Windows, so we turn to Lucida Sans Unicode and Lucida Sans to get a similar look. Unfortunately, both typefaces have imperfections that make them less-than-worthy candidates for substitution. The solution to this is to create a hybrid font set, like so.

Its assigns Lucida Sans Unicode as the base font and override the other elements (add others if you like) with Lucida Sans. This effectively combines the best of both.