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Garamond is not a good font to use in web copy (2010)
- rvz 5y agoI am going to definitely use Garamond on the web.
- swiley 5y agoIIRC that would require paying a license fee (which is one of the reasons it's not a popular font outside of weird situations like courts.)
- bilater 5y agoGaramond is available on Google Fonts with an Open License: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond?query=garamond#license https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond?query=garamond...
- aendruk 5y agoGeorg Mayr-Duffner’s EB Garamond [1] and Octavio Pardo’s fork EB Garamond 12 [2] are excellent, both OFL-1.1. [1] https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond [2] https://github.com/octaviopardo/EBGaramond12 https://github.com/octaviopardo/EBGaramond12
- cogburnd02 5y agoAnd for low-resolution displays, there's Bitmap Garamond. https://www.all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/garamond.html https://www.all-day-breakfast.com/cannam/garamond.html
- jmull 5y agoIt looks like this article is from about 10 years ago (if there’s a date, I missed it), and the author’s point is that displays generally can’t render Garamond very well. Interestingly, the author notes the high ppi of the iPhone 4 and wonders if Garamond might be a good choice in the future… which, more or less, is now.
- WA 5y agoYou're on to something here "primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https://designforhackers.com/blog/garamond/#primaryimage"},"datePublished":"2010-08-12T18:54:48+00:00","dateModified":"2017-11-13T03:20:03+00:00"
- flobosg 5y agoAlso: <meta property="article:published_time" content="2010-08-12T18:54:48+00:00" /> <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2017-11-13T03:20:03+00:00" />
- patorjk 5y ago"(2010)" should probably be added to this post's title. It's a shame SEO optimization has led to publishers removing dates from blog posts. It's a real detriment to readers.
- sebmellen 5y agoFor me, it was the "Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported" message that gave it away.
- Eric_WVGG 5y agoCuriously, it is still nearly impossible to buy an external display with “retina grade” resolution. (The only one on the market is the LG Ultrafine and I’m looking at one right now… don’t get me started on this fucking dog.) And while laptops are certainly much more popular than desktops, retina grade displays are still an option for most non-Apple computers. So yeah, we haven’t dug ourselves out of this hole yet.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI have an LG Ultrafine and an LG 24UD58-B. https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-24UD58-B-4k-uhd-led-monitor https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-24UD58-B-4k-uhd-led-monito... The 24UD58-B isn't quite as good, but for $300, it's a lot cheaper than $700.
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- Tagbert 5y agoIt would have been nice if that article had set some text in Garamond so that we could see how it looks on our displays. Images of individual letters do not get the idea across.
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- SeanLuke 5y ago> So, the popular web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Times New Roman) are such not only because of their wide availability, but because they are drawn with the screen’s limitations in mind. Um. Times New Roman was commissioned in 1931. Arial was developed in 1982.
- carlmr 5y agoAnd I always thought Times New Roman sucks on screen before Full HD.
- SeanLuke 5y agoI find Times New Roman very bad in general. It was designed for one purpose: extreme horizontal compactness for narrow columns in newspapers. That function is almost obsolete at this point, and Times has poor legibility compared to wider fonts.
- skhr0680 5y agoBack when screens were low DPI fonts needed to be hinted and adjusted to look good. Times New Roman went through that process. In the case of Arial, yes, computers existed in 1982
- dredmorbius 5y agoBitmapped displays were rare in 1982. The Apple Macintosh was 2 years away, as was X11 (the X Windowing System) for Unix. Even the Macintosh predecessor Lisa was released in 1983. The Andrew Project dates to 1982. The Xerox Star and Apollo systems date to 1981, the year prior to Ariel's release. Only the Xerox Alto significantly preceded Ariel (1973), but it was not widely used.
- wodenokoto 5y ago> This Flash animation that I created ... How old is this article? And how do I get to view this animation?
- captainmuon 5y agoYou can try the Ruffle browser extension. It emulates Flash in WebAssembly (https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs). Although it seems the animation he means is the same as the gif below.
- hnbad 5y ago(2011) While the archive.org snapshots only go back to 2019, this is basically word-for-word from his 2011 book, which had a chapter with the same title. As others have commented, the advice doesn't necessarily hold true with high DPI displays anymore.
- marvindanig 5y agoUgh. This is an outdated article. Modern day displays are crisp enough to render sophisticated serif typefaces. For example, this book [1] on the web uses EB Garamond [2] to present the content: [1] https://bubblin.io/book/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bidyananda-giriji-maharaj/1 https://bubblin.io/book/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bi... [2] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond [3] https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant+Garamond https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Cormorant+Garamond
- twobitshifter 5y agoUnrelated, but flipping through that book is one of the few times I wished for a UI that did not keep pages in your your history. Flip through a few pages and try to click back.
- marvindanig 5y agohmm. It magically becomes very useful if you were to actually read the book and not just flip through capriciously.
- twobitshifter 5y agoThat may be, I was just trying to get to a page with the font which needed a lot of flipping. If the book were opened in a new tab, I don’t think I’d have the same complaint.
- marvindanig 5y agoHmm. That's a solid point. Thank you! I should have shared the Cover [1] instead of the Book itself. Then it'd have opened on a new tab. [1] https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-bidyananda-giriji-maharaj#frontmatter https://bubblin.io/cover/a-108-verses-of-the-gita-by-swami-b...
- dredmorbius 5y agoTypical practice has been to offer long-form content broken by section (typically chapter), with internal section links for finer references. This balances the history-pollution, pagination, and link-based reference needs. (There's been some playing with the notion of linking content within web pages by the specific text or string. such as, say, "There's been some playing". With word-based ngrams, 4--5 word sequences are strongly likely to be unique within a work, save for cliched phrases or idioms.)
- jacobsievers 5y ago"... Garamond is considered one of the best fonts in existence." Best? But not good enough? I'm confused. Maybe those surveyed designers meant "important." In which case, why do we need it on our devices now, 520-odd years later?
- formerly_proven 5y agoGaramond was developed for woodcuts a couple hundred years ago -- woodcuts have higher resolution than typical PC displays (the majority of which are still at around 100 DPI).
- sbuk 5y agoWhen you consider it was designed over 500 years ago, and there are very few font fonts that match it in terms of elegance vs readability, it is certainly one of the best old-style serifs there are. Unfortunately, font rendering still isn't up to scratch on the majority-share desktop OS, despite the amount of pixels now available. Add to that the prevelance of 1080p screens in use, Garamond just doesn't work well in those places because of it's elegance.
- twobitshifter 5y ago* The author mentions higher dpi displays, so maybe this is null and void now. Is 96 dpi still what we should use for the average user? * I liked the idea of pixel fonts (developed for the material of pixels), are these set for 96 dpi or always lower for aesthetics? * I found a repository with 3 pixel optimized fonts, including Garamond, open sans, and special elite. https://github.com/teryror/pixel-fonts https://github.com/teryror/pixel-fonts
- arp242 5y ago> The author mentions higher dpi displays, so maybe this is null and void now. Is 96 dpi still what we should use for the average user? My 15" laptop I'm typing this now at 1920x1080 is ~150 DPI. The same resolution at 22" (a normal screen size) is 100 DPI. The author talks about 100 DPI for "the cheap Dell monitor I’m typing this" and 115 DPI for their laptop. So DPI hasn't improved all that much it seems, at least for computer screens. Looking at the stats for my weblog, about 40% use a low-DPI (<150 DPI) screen. The rest are >HD or mobile. This is heavily skewed towards programmer/IT people, who probably have better screens than average. So personally, I'd say that designing for 96 DPI is still a good default.
- merricksb 5y agoOriginal HN discussion from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598513
- indymike 5y agoIn short, fonts that have smaller x weights display smaller, and this leads to lots of ugly on low pixel density devices. I've been working on type for a new web app, and an easy way to find fonts with similar x weight would be helpful...
- SavantIdiot 5y ago"Garamond is a bad font for the web, let's start by explaining cuneiform..." For a 10-year old article, it certainly predicted SEO trends.
- Spivak 5y agoI mean it is a good example to really hammer home that font designs heavily depend on how they're rendered because you get lots of people who say "well it's good for print and must therefore be good for digital" when fonts designed with anti-aliasing in mind exist and perform better.
- dhosek 5y agoIt’s worth noting that pure PPI isn’t a good predictor of being able to render pre-digital designs well. Hermann Zapf’s Optima is the classic example of this. It was one of the first Type 1 fonts released from Adobe/Linotype back in the 80s and was an immediate disappointment at anything less than 1200ppi because the subtle aspects of the design were lost in the digitization process. A renewed digital recut of the typeface might resolve some of the issues, but the consensus at the time was that 300ppi was nowhere near enough to properly render Optima’s design.
- consp 5y agoThe author also mentions the 16m colors "now" (2010) commonly available. Even now, most displays are still only 6bit/color/pixel at best with some smart techniques to make it look a bit better. I wonder how much that influences the gradients and readability. I am not talking about the creme de la creme displays of the HN crowd but the average display.
- rcarmo 5y ago...which is why I've settled on Georgia. You get the readability of serifs and enough curves to make it pleasing. Garamond (and Palatino) have always had weird hinting on displays.
- avipars 5y agoI only really use it for condensing large documents into a smaller page
- jacknews 5y agoA good example of why web pages should always have a date.
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