Skip to content
Home / Fonts / Microsoft / Verdana Pro
Verdana Pro

Verdana® Pro

by Microsoft
Individual Styles from $40.00
Complete family of 20 fonts: $299.00
Verdana Pro Font Family was designed by David Berlow, Matthew Carter, Tom Rickner, David Jonathan Ross and published by Microsoft. Verdana Pro contains 20 styles and family package options.

More about this family
FREE 30-DAY TRIAL of Monotype Fonts to get over 150,000 fonts from more than 1,400 type foundries. Start free trial
Start free trial

About Verdana Pro Font Family


The Verdana typeface family was designed specifically to address the challenges of on-screen display. Verdana was originally designed by world-renowned type designer Matthew Carter, and tuned for screen display by the leading TrueType hinting expert, Tom Rickner. The Verdana fonts are unique examples of type designed specifically for the computer screen.The Verdana family received a major update in 2011 as a collaboration between The Font Bureau, Monotype Imaging and Matthew Carter. The original Verdana family included only four fonts: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. The new and expanded Verdana Pro family contains 20 fonts in total. The Verdana Pro and Verdana Pro Condensed families each contain 10 fonts: Light, Regular, Semibold, Bold and Black (each with matching italic styles).Verdana exhibits characteristics derived from the pixel rather than the pen, the brush or the chisel. The balance between straight, curve and diagonal were meticulously tuned to ensure that the pixel patterns at small sizes are pleasing, clear and legible. Commonly confused characters, such as the lowercase i j l, the uppercase I J L and the number 1, have been carefully drawn for maximum individuality - an important characteristic of fonts designed for on-screen use. Another reason for the legibility of the Verdana fonts on the screen is their generous width and spacing.Designed by David Berlow and David Johnathan Ross of the Font Bureau, with typographic consultation by Matthew Carter, the new Verdana Pro includes a variety of advanced typographic features including true small capitals, ligatures, fractions, old style figures, lining tabular figures and lining proportional figures. An OpenType-savvy application is required to access these typographic features. The expanded weights and completely new condensed range of fonts provide designers with an expanded palette of typographic options for use in print and on-screen, in both small text sizes and headlines.

Designers: David Berlow, Matthew Carter, Tom Rickner, David Jonathan Ross

Publisher: Microsoft

Foundry: Microsoft

Original Foundry: Font Bureau

Design Owner: Monotype - Font Bureau

MyFonts debut: null

Verdana® Pro is either a registered trademark or a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

About Microsoft

The Typography Group at Microsoft is responsible for both fonts and the font rendering systems in Windows. Since version 3.1 the primary font system built into Windows has been the TrueType system, licensed from Apple in a deal (with hindsight) remarkably beneficial to Microsoft. Working with Monotype, the Microsoft Typography Group produced fine TrueType versions of Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, tuned to be extremely legible on the screen; these were all ready for the launch of Windows 3.1. Since then these core fonts have been developed to cover more and more of the world’s languages. In the mid-1990s under Robert Norton a program of truly new type designs was begun, using TrueType technology to render faithfully the bitmaps and outlines designed by Matthew Carter (Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma) and by in-house designer Vincent Connare (Trebuchet, Comic Sans). Until August 2002 these “core fonts” were offered freely over the Web, where they made an undoubtedly positive contribution in terms of legibility and font choice. In 1996 the OpenType initiative with Adobe was announced; this is touted as the end of the font wars’, whereby advanced multilingual text layout becomes available, native rendering of PostScript fonts becomes part of Windows 2000, and unwieldy font formats are rationalized. In 1998 the group announced ClearType. This is a very ingenious method to increase legibility on color LCD screens, individually targeting the 3 subpixels (red, green and blue) that make up each pixel. Such a leap forward in readability on these screens is a crucial element to the success of nascent eBook technology. Simon Daniels at the Group’s website keeps font fans and font developers up to date with most aspects of the digital typography scene, and communicates the technicalities of how fonts work in Windows. Updating us about the current (October 2000) activity of the Group, Simon notes: 1999 saw several members of the group leave to join Microsoft’s eBooks group. These included technical lead Greg Hitchcock, developers Beat Stamm and Paul Linerud as well as former Monotype hinters Michael Duggan and Geraldine Wade. The past twelve months has beeen a rebuilding period for the group, with numerous new hires [sic.] replacing earlier departures. The Group continues to provide font related services for Microsoft, and freely licensed tools and technology to the wider type development community. On August 12, 2002 Microsoft discontinued the free availability of the “core fonts”, noting that “the downloads were being abused” in terms of their end-user license agreements. Most commentators took this to mean the company objected to the fact that the fonts were being installed with Linux distributions.

Read more

Read less