5 ms·

I've found the performance of web fonts to become more of a problem over the past year or so, I guess this is as their popularity has increased. 1. Privacy It

by mrmondo 11y ago

I've found the performance of web fonts to become more of a problem over the past year or so, I guess this is as their popularity has increased. 1. Privacy It's well known that companies such as Google and Adobe use web fonts to track users that may not even (knowingly) be their customers. 2. Performance Just last week I logged a bug with our developers when our monitoring started picking up that one of their staging / demo sites was taking a long time to render, turns out they were using a web font provided by Hoefler & Co's 'typography.com' which is incredibly slow to load, here's the waterfall of the page load: http://i.imgur.com/riNT3hH.png http://i.imgur.com/riNT3hH.png

dingaling 11y ago
3. Readability My enjoyment of the web improved immensely when I disabled font selection on web pages and imposed my own serif font over them all. Occasionally this does result in breakages when a particular site relies on icons embedded in a web font but I accept that as the cost of my choice.
- chrisan 11y ago
  Speaking of readability, I cannot stand these 200 weight thin fonts that only look good on a "retina" device places choose to use sometimes
  - mrmondo 11y ago
    Personally I really like extra light fonts, I find them much more readable.
  - knight17 11y ago
    I also have the same feeling that thin fonts look ugly on my humble LCD screen with dismal resolution and low ppi. I was once complaining to a friend how ugly site X is and he said it looked right to him; later when I saw his machine it has a nice display that made site X look twice as better on my shitty display. Lots of sites are designed on (and for?) high density displays and it ends up looking awful on low resolution screens like mine.
    - 9248 11y ago
      It's baffling for me that designers/coders don't realize that desktop and laptop display panels are probably the first thing a manufacturer will look at when it comes to cutting some corners and lowering the overall price of the product. Also most 'normal' users will never pay the x4-x10 premium price for some fancy IPS display and calibrate its colors.
spankalee 11y ago
> It's well known that companies such as Google and Adobe use web fonts to track users that may not even (knowingly) be their customers. Citation? Google Web Fonts explicitly doesn't use any cookies or track users in any way: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what-does-using-the-google-fonts-api-mean-for-the-privacy-of-my-users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what-does-usin...
kzrdude 11y ago
How can typography.com still have customers, if it looks like this? Did they budget for those 2 seconds extra load time while they set up the new design?
- Theodores 11y ago
  Now there is a story... On the website I work on we had some horrid typography.com font loaded, which was theoretically a good idea, once upon a time. Since this is a legacy site I work on with whomever having worked on it before, I realised that there was no significant content using this font, in fact it was only in email templates (not that email does web fonts). So I ripped the little blighter out. I added in some 'lookalike' fonts from Google in the places where the typography.com font should have been, all looked improved, everything worked. But then we hire some new clowns to do some new theme. Obviously I am typecast as a 'backend dev' so I was not privy to whatever those conversations were. So the typography.com font is back in use! Fantastic (not)!!! So the same process that led to the last awful frontend (get some agency that don't care about our product to project manage something to death) results in the reappearance of the same awful font technology. That sir is how typography.com still get customers. The marketing people, the managers that have no technical skills, the print designer and some outside agency just do it even though (four months earlier) the only coder in the building speeded up the site and made it vaguely legible by getting rid of the silly typography.com junk. I am very much a believer in design which is content first and, as Steve Jobs said, 'how it works'. I too like a good font and always inspect a page where the typography stands out as I like to be informed on font names and combinations. I am also a believer in going for AA accessibility. Obviously the typography.com font will be spidery grey text against a grey background, not accessible!
jrochkind1 11y ago
I tried to look into this once, and I _think_ Google's license for the free fonts, allows you to download all the font assets and serve them yourself if you want too. If you want to trade the convenience of google hosting for your own local hosting (or more likely your own CDN), to avoid tracking and have your own control of performance. But I wasn't even completely sure I was reading Google's licenses right (and I don't have notes to track what docs I was looking at, sorry), and then other hosts like Adobe are another thing entirely.
- kps 11y ago
  All the Google-served web fonts are open source, mostly OFL or Apache licensed. https://github.com/google/fonts https://github.com/google/fonts

by mrmondo 11y ago

dingaling 11y ago

3. Readability My enjoyment of the web improved immensely when I disabled font selection on web pages and imposed my own serif font over them all. Occasionally this does result in breakages when a particular site relies on icons embedded in a web font but I accept that as the cost of my choice.

chrisan 11y ago
Speaking of readability, I cannot stand these 200 weight thin fonts that only look good on a "retina" device places choose to use sometimes
- mrmondo 11y ago
  Personally I really like extra light fonts, I find them much more readable.
- knight17 11y ago
  I also have the same feeling that thin fonts look ugly on my humble LCD screen with dismal resolution and low ppi. I was once complaining to a friend how ugly site X is and he said it looked right to him; later when I saw his machine it has a nice display that made site X look twice as better on my shitty display. Lots of sites are designed on (and for?) high density displays and it ends up looking awful on low resolution screens like mine.
  - 9248 11y ago
    It's baffling for me that designers/coders don't realize that desktop and laptop display panels are probably the first thing a manufacturer will look at when it comes to cutting some corners and lowering the overall price of the product. Also most 'normal' users will never pay the x4-x10 premium price for some fancy IPS display and calibrate its colors.

spankalee 11y ago

> It's well known that companies such as Google and Adobe use web fonts to track users that may not even (knowingly) be their customers. Citation? Google Web Fonts explicitly doesn't use any cookies or track users in any way: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what-does-using-the-google-fonts-api-mean-for-the-privacy-of-my-users https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq?hl=en#what-does-usin...

kzrdude 11y ago

How can typography.com still have customers, if it looks like this? Did they budget for those 2 seconds extra load time while they set up the new design?

Theodores 11y ago
Now there is a story... On the website I work on we had some horrid typography.com font loaded, which was theoretically a good idea, once upon a time. Since this is a legacy site I work on with whomever having worked on it before, I realised that there was no significant content using this font, in fact it was only in email templates (not that email does web fonts). So I ripped the little blighter out. I added in some 'lookalike' fonts from Google in the places where the typography.com font should have been, all looked improved, everything worked. But then we hire some new clowns to do some new theme. Obviously I am typecast as a 'backend dev' so I was not privy to whatever those conversations were. So the typography.com font is back in use! Fantastic (not)!!! So the same process that led to the last awful frontend (get some agency that don't care about our product to project manage something to death) results in the reappearance of the same awful font technology. That sir is how typography.com still get customers. The marketing people, the managers that have no technical skills, the print designer and some outside agency just do it even though (four months earlier) the only coder in the building speeded up the site and made it vaguely legible by getting rid of the silly typography.com junk. I am very much a believer in design which is content first and, as Steve Jobs said, 'how it works'. I too like a good font and always inspect a page where the typography stands out as I like to be informed on font names and combinations. I am also a believer in going for AA accessibility. Obviously the typography.com font will be spidery grey text against a grey background, not accessible!

jrochkind1 11y ago

I tried to look into this once, and I _think_ Google's license for the free fonts, allows you to download all the font assets and serve them yourself if you want too. If you want to trade the convenience of google hosting for your own local hosting (or more likely your own CDN), to avoid tracking and have your own control of performance. But I wasn't even completely sure I was reading Google's licenses right (and I don't have notes to track what docs I was looking at, sorry), and then other hosts like Adobe are another thing entirely.

kps 11y ago
All the Google-served web fonts are open source, mostly OFL or Apache licensed. https://github.com/google/fonts https://github.com/google/fonts