 ok so thats a little extreme im going to preface this post a little bit i love helvetica as a font its a gorgeous font and it has stood the test of time so now that everyone understands my opinion on the font ill go back to my original post why do designers decide to use helvetica for their sites body copy it looks awful at small sizes the sizes that i think have the most problems are 12px and lower unfortunately i have seen sites that use body copy as small as 10px its pretty sad that when i get to a site that uses a small size of helvetica as the body copy i change the body font family to verdana using firebug i made an example page to show the various helvetica sizes from 10px 20px helvetica on windows helvetica on the mac in conclusion so i guess this is more of a call to action than a post so web designers stop using helvetica at such small sizes 