6 ms·

Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one lin

Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts. If macOS, Windows, Debian, iOS, and Android all came with Roboto, Source Sans, Lato, Merriweather, Raleway, etc. pre-installed, then we could make the case that if we used those fonts instead of non-free ones we would have consistency across all platforms and better performance for our users. Since I doubt that day will ever come, we instead need to weigh an inconsistent appearance against a poor experience for those on slow connections. Different organizations will choose to prioritize different things, and that's ok. A significant portion of marketers and designers will always demand pixel perfection for their websites. I'm just glad we're not putting text inside of images any more.

jimktrains2 10y ago
> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? > Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts. This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're stuck with unreasonable people.
- esonderegger 10y ago
  I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do. Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.
  - alanh 10y ago
    Where you are wrong, I think, is that “the presentation IS the content” is a common belief among “designers” but almost never the belief of users.
    - myrion 10y ago
      That's not really true. They won't consciously believe that, but they won't use the technically superior product, if the competitor has the basics and a better design.
- hyperpape 10y ago
  Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s. As a profession, we can't complain that someone might be bothered by the idea of word-wrapping.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s. It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row. There's nothing wrong with that.
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      > It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row Presumably, that's why they used 80 characters in the first place, as anything more is too hard to read.
      - Gruselbauer 10y ago
        Isn't it more so it is readable inside a phone display to an ssh session as well as a fat 4K screen? That's my reason at least. Can always scale up something, but line breaks I didn't make myself make me want to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of a demonic deity taking the earthly form of a little girl. Or, you know, angry.
      - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
        132 column displays were common by the end of the 1970s. 80 column displays date back to the early 1970s. I started coding on an 80 column display, and I have no doubt at all that a modern 16:9 monitor that can display a double page PDF or a web page with a variety of fonts is a much better display device.
      - lmm 10y ago
        It was 80 columns to match a punch card, AIUI, not a decision on readability grounds at all.
Gracana 10y ago
Why can't we just deal with the fact that different devices will display your content differently? The world doesn't need better fonts, the world needs better designers.
cool-RR 10y ago
I think that designers are always trying to get the latest, coolest fonts. If you make Roboto and friends part of the OS, then you'll get a new wave of cool new fonts that aren't a part of the OS. There's always a push from people to have their website look special, and, dare I say it, pop.
- esonderegger 10y ago
  There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere. Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."
  - colejohnson66 10y ago
    But what about Arial versus Helvetica Neue? /s
matt4077 10y ago
> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? Yeah, I have. In the 90ies. Saying that it's a reason for any designer of any website that matters today is just trying to set up a strawman.
erikpukinskis 10y ago
This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium. They'll sit lovingly with a bunch of dinged up old lead typesetting tools, positively jizz over imperfections in ink distribution, but try to talk to them about system fonts, box models, or free phones and their eyes glaze over and they drift off into their color calibrated RAW dreamland. In schools they teach people to embrace media but that only applies to fetishized antique media. They'll use half of the GPU to render CRT glow too, with 8-bit graphics, gush about material metaphors in their visual design, but they won't consider the material properties of the actual distribution medium for their work. We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age. Maybe very briefly for a year or two in the nineties when browsers were good enough to be interesting but not good enough to do anyrhing. It'll come eventually, but it's taking its sweet time.
- Gruselbauer 10y ago
  Any recommendations as for investigating your last point? What would constitute a truly modernist design in your view? Good food for thought, thanks.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  This is a completely unrealistic view of how designers work. I've yet to meet a web designer who would have the first clue what to do with hot metal. There are some old guys who remember physical typesetting for print, but design has been primarily electronic for around twenty years now. The history of the web started after most print had already moved to digital fonts and layout with Pagemaker, then Quark Xpress. It's one of the tragedies of browser development that it took the web 15 years to start to catch up with industry standard page layout possibilities, and another 5 years to start dealing with fonts intelligently. And the web - frankly - still sucks for this kind of work. It's not that responsive design is harder than print, it's more that from a designer's POV CSS has been a train wreck for most of its history. I understand some people here want their own font stylings, and that's fine. But designers use fonts for a reason, and "Not invented here because I don't like this" isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for them to do that.

jimktrains2 10y ago

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? > Until we can get the major operating systems to include some of the most popular open-source fonts, we're stuck with web fonts. This really seems to be a problem with marketing and design people; we're not stuck with webfonts. We're stuck with unreasonable people.

esonderegger 10y ago
I tend to agree with you, but I think it's important to constantly be trying to understand where other people are coming from. They might not be so unreasonable; they just have different priorities than we do. Our idea of what a webpage is might be a text document where the presentation is less important than the content. To others, the presentation IS the content. For some people, it might depend on what message the page is trying to convey.
- alanh 10y ago
  Where you are wrong, I think, is that “the presentation IS the content” is a common belief among “designers” but almost never the belief of users.
  - myrion 10y ago
    That's not really true. They won't consciously believe that, but they won't use the technically superior product, if the competitor has the basics and a better design.
hyperpape 10y ago
Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s. As a profession, we can't complain that someone might be bothered by the idea of word-wrapping.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > Many people in our profession write code that's less that 80 characters per line because that's how much you could display on terminals in the 70s. It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row. There's nothing wrong with that.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    > It's _also_ a very reasonable & readable amount of text in a row Presumably, that's why they used 80 characters in the first place, as anything more is too hard to read.
    - Gruselbauer 10y ago
      Isn't it more so it is readable inside a phone display to an ssh session as well as a fat 4K screen? That's my reason at least. Can always scale up something, but line breaks I didn't make myself make me want to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of a demonic deity taking the earthly form of a little girl. Or, you know, angry.
    - TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
      132 column displays were common by the end of the 1970s. 80 column displays date back to the early 1970s. I started coding on an 80 column display, and I have no doubt at all that a modern 16:9 monitor that can display a double page PDF or a web page with a variety of fonts is a much better display device.
    - lmm 10y ago
      It was 80 columns to match a punch card, AIUI, not a decision on readability grounds at all.

Gracana 10y ago

Why can't we just deal with the fact that different devices will display your content differently? The world doesn't need better fonts, the world needs better designers.

cool-RR 10y ago

I think that designers are always trying to get the latest, coolest fonts. If you make Roboto and friends part of the OS, then you'll get a new wave of cool new fonts that aren't a part of the OS. There's always a push from people to have their website look special, and, dare I say it, pop.

esonderegger 10y ago
There are definitely designers who are going for pop by looking for a new font, but I've worked on a lot of projects where the designer just wanted a good, legible, sans-serif that looks the same everywhere. Who am I kidding, what they want is Helvetica and for the website to look exactly like the comps they made in Photoshop. Sometimes they're willing to find the money for the license fee and sometimes they're willing to accept Source Sans as a substitute. I've never once had them say "the difference between Helvetica and Arial isn't worth the 250ms delay caused by using a web font."
- colejohnson66 10y ago
  But what about Arial versus Helvetica Neue? /s

matt4077 10y ago

> Have none of you ever worked for a designer or marketing person who was unwilling to accept that a bit of text might wrap on Windows (Arial), but fit on one line on a Mac (Helvetica)? Yeah, I have. In the 90ies. Saying that it's a reason for any designer of any website that matters today is just trying to set up a strawman.

erikpukinskis 10y ago

This is because a vanishingly small percentage of designers have truly, in their heart, accepted the web as a medium. They'll sit lovingly with a bunch of dinged up old lead typesetting tools, positively jizz over imperfections in ink distribution, but try to talk to them about system fonts, box models, or free phones and their eyes glaze over and they drift off into their color calibrated RAW dreamland. In schools they teach people to embrace media but that only applies to fetishized antique media. They'll use half of the GPU to render CRT glow too, with 8-bit graphics, gush about material metaphors in their visual design, but they won't consider the material properties of the actual distribution medium for their work. We still haven't seen a true modernist design movement in the digital age. Maybe very briefly for a year or two in the nineties when browsers were good enough to be interesting but not good enough to do anyrhing. It'll come eventually, but it's taking its sweet time.

Gruselbauer 10y ago
Any recommendations as for investigating your last point? What would constitute a truly modernist design in your view? Good food for thought, thanks.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
This is a completely unrealistic view of how designers work. I've yet to meet a web designer who would have the first clue what to do with hot metal. There are some old guys who remember physical typesetting for print, but design has been primarily electronic for around twenty years now. The history of the web started after most print had already moved to digital fonts and layout with Pagemaker, then Quark Xpress. It's one of the tragedies of browser development that it took the web 15 years to start to catch up with industry standard page layout possibilities, and another 5 years to start dealing with fonts intelligently. And the web - frankly - still sucks for this kind of work. It's not that responsive design is harder than print, it's more that from a designer's POV CSS has been a train wreck for most of its history. I understand some people here want their own font stylings, and that's fine. But designers use fonts for a reason, and "Not invented here because I don't like this" isn't a good enough reason to make it impossible for them to do that.