It’s true that most of the iPhone doesn’t make use of alternate fonts — the applications, UI elements and your data all render in Helvetica.

However, microsites viewed in MobileSafari will render using whatever font is specified in a page’s markup. If your project is iPhone specific you no longer need to specify multiple fonts - though it’s good practice to do so. But keep in mind MobileSafari is limited to the fonts installed on the iPhone. Here’s the list:

• American Typewriter
• Arial
• Arial Rounded MT Bold
• Courier
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Helvetica
• Helvetica Neue
• Marker Felt
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana
• Zapfino

Type appears noticeably crisper on our iPhones compared to Mac desktop displays. The smaller pixels render extremely crisp and appear similar to printed type.

One point about the list of fonts included with the iPhone is that it’s short: a mere 11 typeface families. While every megabyte matters with the iPhone’s relatively limited storage and RAM, fonts aren’t that big! Most font families weigh under 1 MB, and with a minimum of 4 GB of storage and 128 MB of RAM, the iPhone is roughly equivalent in terms of storage and memory to an OS 8 or 9 system from a decade ago — machines which shipped with a much wider range of fonts.

Hopefully iPhone will allow for greater font support in the future, but for the meantime, thats what you’re working’ with.

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