"At the end of the day, a custom font just isn't very important for the vast majority of sites." I also believe performance should trump other design aspects o

"At the end of the day, a custom font just isn't very important for the vast majority of sites." I also believe performance should trump other design aspects of a website. This means including using the default Operating System (OS) font stack over a custom font if it means faster page loads. However, I also recognise that a carefully chosen custom font plays a big part in the aesthetics of a website. It can set the tone of the website as well as giving it a distinctive look that sets it apart from other websites. Can you imagine books, posters, magazines, films etc all set in a limited palette of available fonts? The variety of typefaces available is infinite and the printed word is immeasurably richer for it. There are ways of limiting the download size of fonts. For example, limiting typeface weights (e.g. 3 weights only: regular, bold, italic) can amount to approx 60kb of downloads in total (20kb per font x 3 using the WOFF2 font format). That might still be too much for many developers, but I suspect that images will be larger (and possibly JavaScript too).