Some distinctive characteristics in georgia’s letters are the small eye of the ‘e’ and the bowl of the a, which has a sharp hook upwards at top left. The ‘M’ is slightly splayed. The x-height (height of lower-case letters) is low, especially at larger sizes, making the capitals large relative to the lower case, while the top serifs on the ascenders of letters like ‘d’ have a downward slope and rise subtly above the cap height. Georgia typefaces are popular and often used, particularly for printing body text and books.

As a transitional serif design, Georgia shows a number of traditional features of ‘rational’ serif typefaces from around the early 19th century, such as alternating thick and thin strokes, ball terminals, a vertical axis and an italic taking inspiration from calligraphy. Its figure (numeral) designs are lower-case or text figures, designed to blend into continuous text; this was at the time a rare feature in computer fonts.

Georgia’s bold is also unusually bold, almost black. Carter noted that, “Verdana and Georgia… were all about binary bitmaps: every pixel was on or off, black or white… The bold versions of Verdana and Georgia are bolder than most bolds, because on the screen, at the time we were doing this in the mid-1990s, if the stem wanted to be thicker than one pixel, it could only go to two pixels. That is a bigger jump in weight than is conventional in print series.”

The Georgia typeface is similar to Times New Roman, another revival of transitional serif designs, but with many subtle differences: Georgia is larger than Times at the same point size, and has a much larger x-height at the same actual size.