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People can bang on about typography all they like, but any browser that won't let me override the designer's choice of fonts with ones that actually render nice
by nervechannel 16y ago
People can bang on about typography all they like, but any browser that won't let me override the designer's choice of fonts with ones that actually render nicely on my display won't get used.
(I'm looking at you Chrome)
Over here, font fanaticism is (sensibly) restricted to images.
How can a web designer have any idea what will look nice on a display with completely different visual characteristics to his own? Especially if the OS has a completely different font rendering library to boot.
- teilo 16y agoThis article is not about fonts.
- nervechannel 16y agoLet me explain this slowly. From the article: "Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance." If you lay out your text in a way that only works right when viewed in the typeface and font size that your own browser is using, then you'll fail in terms of readability, accessibility and usability. The Vinh pages that the article holds up as a shining beacon of good typography are particularly bad in this regard. On my display at work, they are mangled in various amateurish ways, presumably because my browser is using sufficiently different fonts from the designer's. Words overlap where they shouldn't, or run past the edges of the elements they are supposed to be contained in. It's not a browser standards problem, this is an up-to-date Firefox, but with font overrides in place in order to make sure that I don't have to suffer because of fonts that render poor on my monitor and OS. I contrast this with HN itself, which is a great example of typography that works pretty well no matter what fonts you're using. Is that clearer?