4 ms·

I'm so tired of Helvetica everywhere that this is actually an improvement. Once upon a time it was a great way to make an modernist artistic statement, like "I

I'm so tired of Helvetica everywhere that this is actually an improvement. Once upon a time it was a great way to make an modernist artistic statement, like "Ill" should be three straight lines. Now Helvetica is a meaningless default choice.

bjoli 8y ago
Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font. I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.
- kqr 8y ago
  I don't agree about Verdana. Boring typefaces are fine; typefaces designed for the 640x480 displays of the 1990's have very little space today.
  - bhaak 8y ago
    YMMV but I found Verdana to be a perfect font for my Kindle. Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).
  - hinkley 8y ago
    One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector. So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished. Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.
    - Pulcinella 8y ago
      I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.
      - DonHopkins 8y ago
        You could make your presentations more "multimedia" so the people at the back of the room can smell the difference.
        kqr 8y ago
        I think the word you are looking for is multimodal.
  - bjoli 8y ago
    I don't necessarily like verdana, but it is a very legible font for small font sizes. I happen to like a lot of information on my screen, and I keep font sizes low. For a long time Verdana was my default font for the web. I dislike it as it gets larger though.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  "Boring" is fine by me. Easily-confused characters are not.
- taneq 8y ago
  I really like Arial and I'm not afraid to admit it.
- acdha 8y ago
  Language support used to be huge: I shipped web fonts for years so things would render accents and non-English characters correctly or at all. Dropping Windows XP was joyous. These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern, which I strategically use as a geek shibboleth.
  - alanh 8y ago
    I like you.
detritus 8y ago
It amuses me how this was a sentiment 20+ years ago, when I first started in design.
- eadmund 8y ago
  Well, Helvetica's been old-fashioned for well over 20 years, so it's not suprising that folks would have been over it for that long a time. I remember watching the documentary of the same name, and wondering how everyone could be so fond of what's ultimately a very plain font. Now, Garamond or Bookman — those are fonts! All just a matter of taste, of course.
  - detritus 8y ago
    It's all context, isn't it? Helvetica's use in graphic arts back in the 60s bordered on the sublime, and for that reason has become a foundation stone upon which everything thereafter was built and refers to. It's hard to escape from. I just wish I could peek inside the head of someone in the previous century, witnessing the birth of sans serifs such Akzidenz Grotesk - THAT must have been Earth shaking. And I'm with you on Garamond - I have an entire side project's brand built around it. We outsourced the second iteration of its website (because Shopify is a bit of a dog to dev for on Windows... for me anyway) and the person we outsourced to thought it best to strip out our entire brand language and replace with whatever rounded sans (replete with flat colour scheme) was doing the web fashion rounds of two years ago. We're still putting the pieces back to this day! :) That sort of thing's my marker of a poor 'designer' — someone who has no concept of how to work with what they're given, instead needing to start from scratch. In that vein, if you can't work to other's rules, you're just a decorator.
nicolaslem 8y ago
Does anyone know a good resource to learn about fonts and how to pick and match them? I'd like to know if there is more to choosing a font than just scrolling through all of them and stopping when it looks okay.
- aasasd 8y ago
  The basics are that a font should have immediately recognizable characters (aka glyphs), so that you could read text on a road sign or an indoor navigation sign from afar, in bad lighting, while moving and being nearsignted (it's sorta an edge case but a good one). At the same time, glyphs must form a line that guides the eye without making it stumble—there should be no jarring inconsistencies, of which wrong letter-spacing is a case. Glyph shapes affect the perceived spacing, so there's interplay between the aspects of a font. The Kern Game is a good primer: https://type.method.ac/ https://type.method.ac/ As usual, learning to see good fonts is a matter of recognizing bad ones first. You'd want to look at reviews of bad fonts, more-or-less detailed. Then there's also the matter of the font style: a decorative font may easily have an untasteful twang to it (e.g. “playful” ad fonts), or be overly pretentious for the task. This is also a matter of looking at a lot of examples and thinking of what they make you feel. These are just the basics, and designers sometimes diss fonts that look fine to me. But these help. Also, IMO learning to see and apply the proximity principle covers a lot of design, including typography (e.g. line spacing and paragraph positioning).
- dsr_ 8y ago
  https://www.pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-to-better-typography https://www.pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-... is actually about laying out text more than picking fonts, but it goes hand in hand with https://www.canva.com/learn/font-design/ https://www.canva.com/learn/font-design/ which is approximately what you're asking for.
- wilsonrocks 8y ago
  I recommend the book Stop Stealing Sheep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/378165.Stop_Stealing_Sheep_Find_Out_How_Type_Works https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/378165.Stop_Stealing_She... I haven't read the latest version which says it's updated for the web, but even the copy I have is amazing.

bjoli 8y ago

Helvetica is a fine default choice. So is Arial or verdana or any other "boring" font. I'll go one step further and claim that the times i visited a website where the selected fonts actually improved over browser defaults can be counted on one hand.

kqr 8y ago
I don't agree about Verdana. Boring typefaces are fine; typefaces designed for the 640x480 displays of the 1990's have very little space today.
- bhaak 8y ago
  YMMV but I found Verdana to be a perfect font for my Kindle. Granted, it's a Kindle Touch, I don't know if I would choose it again on one of the newer models (not that I would buy one, Amazon's locking up of those models makes a thriving homebrew scene impossible).
- hinkley 8y ago
  One one project we had to cram a lot of text into a columnar UI. A UI that would be used in meetings on a projector. So we had everyone stand at the back of a medium sized conference room and do a poor man’s eye exam. Verdana had the smallest font that was still readable. Narrower font means less line wrapping and text clipping. None of us knew any font lore so I didn’t learn until much later that this was a design goal of Verdana, but I’d say mission accomplished. Corporate tools at headquarters didn’t like it, and with no context demanded we change it back to a “normal” font. Apparently I’m still upset about this.
  - Pulcinella 8y ago
    I teach Chemistry and have come to rely on Trebuchet MS. It has good readability even at the back of the classroom and it’s capital I, lowercase l, and number 1 are all distinct. You’d be surprised how common students are confused by Carbon and Iodine (CI) vs Chlorine (Cl) for example.
    - DonHopkins 8y ago
      You could make your presentations more "multimedia" so the people at the back of the room can smell the difference.
      - kqr 8y ago
        I think the word you are looking for is multimodal.
- bjoli 8y ago
  I don't necessarily like verdana, but it is a very legible font for small font sizes. I happen to like a lot of information on my screen, and I keep font sizes low. For a long time Verdana was my default font for the web. I dislike it as it gets larger though.
mannykannot 8y ago
"Boring" is fine by me. Easily-confused characters are not.
taneq 8y ago
I really like Arial and I'm not afraid to admit it.
acdha 8y ago
Language support used to be huge: I shipped web fonts for years so things would render accents and non-English characters correctly or at all. Dropping Windows XP was joyous. These days I generally agree except for things like logos or games, or specialized applications like the dyslexia-friendly fonts. It’s hard to beat rendering immediately for most uses.
peatmoss 8y ago
I learned page layout in the 90s, and have by virtue of the time period, committed acts of typography tantamount to war crimes. As such, I have self-imposed a lifetime ban on “getting clever” with fonts. My one exception is Computer Modern, which I strategically use as a geek shibboleth.
- alanh 8y ago
  I like you.

detritus 8y ago

It amuses me how this was a sentiment 20+ years ago, when I first started in design.

eadmund 8y ago
Well, Helvetica's been old-fashioned for well over 20 years, so it's not suprising that folks would have been over it for that long a time. I remember watching the documentary of the same name, and wondering how everyone could be so fond of what's ultimately a very plain font. Now, Garamond or Bookman — those are fonts! All just a matter of taste, of course.
- detritus 8y ago
  It's all context, isn't it? Helvetica's use in graphic arts back in the 60s bordered on the sublime, and for that reason has become a foundation stone upon which everything thereafter was built and refers to. It's hard to escape from. I just wish I could peek inside the head of someone in the previous century, witnessing the birth of sans serifs such Akzidenz Grotesk - THAT must have been Earth shaking. And I'm with you on Garamond - I have an entire side project's brand built around it. We outsourced the second iteration of its website (because Shopify is a bit of a dog to dev for on Windows... for me anyway) and the person we outsourced to thought it best to strip out our entire brand language and replace with whatever rounded sans (replete with flat colour scheme) was doing the web fashion rounds of two years ago. We're still putting the pieces back to this day! :) That sort of thing's my marker of a poor 'designer' — someone who has no concept of how to work with what they're given, instead needing to start from scratch. In that vein, if you can't work to other's rules, you're just a decorator.

nicolaslem 8y ago

Does anyone know a good resource to learn about fonts and how to pick and match them? I'd like to know if there is more to choosing a font than just scrolling through all of them and stopping when it looks okay.

aasasd 8y ago
The basics are that a font should have immediately recognizable characters (aka glyphs), so that you could read text on a road sign or an indoor navigation sign from afar, in bad lighting, while moving and being nearsignted (it's sorta an edge case but a good one). At the same time, glyphs must form a line that guides the eye without making it stumble—there should be no jarring inconsistencies, of which wrong letter-spacing is a case. Glyph shapes affect the perceived spacing, so there's interplay between the aspects of a font. The Kern Game is a good primer: https://type.method.ac/ https://type.method.ac/ As usual, learning to see good fonts is a matter of recognizing bad ones first. You'd want to look at reviews of bad fonts, more-or-less detailed. Then there's also the matter of the font style: a decorative font may easily have an untasteful twang to it (e.g. “playful” ad fonts), or be overly pretentious for the task. This is also a matter of looking at a lot of examples and thinking of what they make you feel. These are just the basics, and designers sometimes diss fonts that look fine to me. But these help. Also, IMO learning to see and apply the proximity principle covers a lot of design, including typography (e.g. line spacing and paragraph positioning).
dsr_ 8y ago
https://www.pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-to-better-typography https://www.pierrickcalvez.com/journal/a-five-minutes-guide-... is actually about laying out text more than picking fonts, but it goes hand in hand with https://www.canva.com/learn/font-design/ https://www.canva.com/learn/font-design/ which is approximately what you're asking for.
wilsonrocks 8y ago
I recommend the book Stop Stealing Sheep https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/378165.Stop_Stealing_Sheep_Find_Out_How_Type_Works https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/378165.Stop_Stealing_She... I haven't read the latest version which says it's updated for the web, but even the copy I have is amazing.