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I’m sure there’s a few exception, but why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly? The a

I’m sure there’s a few exception, but why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly? The answer is most likely branding, but I don’t recall landing on a company website and going: “That’s not the font from their design guidelines. This is unacceptable, I shall take my business elsewhere” All this tweaking and hacking font loading is a vaste of time.

thingsgoup 5y ago
I gather from your comment that you don’t do frontend. I don’t either. I also think it’s a waste of time. But I think you and I are not the intended audience. I think frontend people are trying to design an experience for users. The same way you or I might be designing an architecture for the system. They want it to look and feel a certain way in order to provoke a response.
- MrPatan 5y ago
  I do front end. It's a waste of time. Pick a common one you like and move on.
setr 5y ago
Branding is bit subtler than that — you’re not going to really say anything about Target’s consistent styling, versus Walmart’s fairly austere aesthetic, but you definitely get a different “feel” from each, before looking at their actual contents/stock. I don’t know whether fonts are really that important to the total equation, but “not terrible enough to walk out the door” is generally a very low bar to meet when designing a thing. Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”. But that’s generally not where you want things to sit as a design goal.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I’m not sure I understand the point about enterprise apps, because that can go both ways. Custom company application tend to be the worst, because they apply all the company branding guidelines, rather than just applying to system defaults.
  - setr 5y ago
    I’m not making the case that one being better than the other, or really trying to say anything about custom vs enterprise. My main point is simply that there’s a significant gap between “it can be used” and “it can be used well” — and a designer’s primary job is to bridge that gap (generally the engineer in us takes us to “it can be used”). That (some? many? majority?) designers aren’t competent is a separate concern… but their abstract goals are fairly obvious and intuitive if difficult to specify concretely And we understand this intuitively, because there are many apps in our section of the universe that fall under it can be used — back-office apps, enterprise apps, etc a constant offender (not say good ones don’t exist, or bad custom apps don’t exist, or bad designers/designs don’t exist… etc — but we’ve all probably encountered a good few that are astoundingly unpleasant to use)
  - hexo 5y ago
    yup, users then even feel violated because some "great" manager somewhere told devs to screw over users settings and for example force user to look at animations, which is like 100 times worse than fonts mentioned earlier.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”. While this is a good point, i don't feel like a discussion about fonts is relevant here. For example, when working with Jira, i don't care about what font it uses, as long as it is legible (e.g. even whatever is the default sans-serif font would work), whereas what actually matters to me in such a context is the responsiveness of the UI and how well it works, UX over UI. If Jira's interface is laggy and slow, or just cumbersome to use because their implementation of custom fields is weird, no font or logo choices will make any of that markedly better. In my eyes, how something looks is largely decoupled from how well it works - if Jira were a GTK/Win32 app with almost no styling, but worked faster than it currently does, i'd probably get more value out of it than i currently do, fancy UI or not. (just using Jira as an example here, because their UI redesign did make things slower and got some backlash from users that was ultimately ignored, i bet the same applies to a lot of other software out there, e.g. how Flutter apps oftentimes break right click behaviour in browsers etc.)
chrisseaton 5y ago
> why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly? Because typography is a means of communication.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I still don’t see how picking a custom font over a default one contributed much to communication. Sure, the font need to be legable, clear destinction between letters all that stuff, but the system fonts is most likely better than a custom one for those things anyway.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Design and art communicate. In fact, that's all they do. Fonts are associated with different periods of time, different groups of people, different artistic and even philosophical movements. Picking a font can help communicate how you see yourself and what you are trying to achieve. A picture paints a thousand words. A world without typography would be a poorer world.
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
      Then why not share all typography with everyone under a license, that allows every OS maker to include all the fonts they want plus allowing users to choose what else to install and then only use system fonts? That way we can have it all, fast websites, without additional secret server side tracking, and the fonts of the system being used and the artist getting their message communicated. No need for any web font.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        I guess there aren’t any commercial incentives to do that. But that doesn’t change that typography is valuable.
        zelphirkalt 5y ago
hexo 5y ago
Exactly!

thingsgoup 5y ago

I gather from your comment that you don’t do frontend. I don’t either. I also think it’s a waste of time. But I think you and I are not the intended audience. I think frontend people are trying to design an experience for users. The same way you or I might be designing an architecture for the system. They want it to look and feel a certain way in order to provoke a response.

MrPatan 5y ago
I do front end. It's a waste of time. Pick a common one you like and move on.

setr 5y ago

Branding is bit subtler than that — you’re not going to really say anything about Target’s consistent styling, versus Walmart’s fairly austere aesthetic, but you definitely get a different “feel” from each, before looking at their actual contents/stock. I don’t know whether fonts are really that important to the total equation, but “not terrible enough to walk out the door” is generally a very low bar to meet when designing a thing. Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”. But that’s generally not where you want things to sit as a design goal.

mrweasel 5y ago
I’m not sure I understand the point about enterprise apps, because that can go both ways. Custom company application tend to be the worst, because they apply all the company branding guidelines, rather than just applying to system defaults.
- setr 5y ago
  I’m not making the case that one being better than the other, or really trying to say anything about custom vs enterprise. My main point is simply that there’s a significant gap between “it can be used” and “it can be used well” — and a designer’s primary job is to bridge that gap (generally the engineer in us takes us to “it can be used”). That (some? many? majority?) designers aren’t competent is a separate concern… but their abstract goals are fairly obvious and intuitive if difficult to specify concretely And we understand this intuitively, because there are many apps in our section of the universe that fall under it can be used — back-office apps, enterprise apps, etc a constant offender (not say good ones don’t exist, or bad custom apps don’t exist, or bad designers/designs don’t exist… etc — but we’ve all probably encountered a good few that are astoundingly unpleasant to use)
- hexo 5y ago
  yup, users then even feel violated because some "great" manager somewhere told devs to screw over users settings and for example force user to look at animations, which is like 100 times worse than fonts mentioned earlier.
KronisLV 5y ago
> Another example in the app space — you know enterprise apps will get the job done, but they’re downright unpleasant to use; from aesthetics to workflow efficiency, they just barely hover over “dealing with it isn’t worth the output”. While this is a good point, i don't feel like a discussion about fonts is relevant here. For example, when working with Jira, i don't care about what font it uses, as long as it is legible (e.g. even whatever is the default sans-serif font would work), whereas what actually matters to me in such a context is the responsiveness of the UI and how well it works, UX over UI. If Jira's interface is laggy and slow, or just cumbersome to use because their implementation of custom fields is weird, no font or logo choices will make any of that markedly better. In my eyes, how something looks is largely decoupled from how well it works - if Jira were a GTK/Win32 app with almost no styling, but worked faster than it currently does, i'd probably get more value out of it than i currently do, fancy UI or not. (just using Jira as an example here, because their UI redesign did make things slower and got some backlash from users that was ultimately ignored, i bet the same applies to a lot of other software out there, e.g. how Flutter apps oftentimes break right click behaviour in browsers etc.)

chrisseaton 5y ago

> why do anyone care about which font is used as long as the basics such as fixed or sans serif is applied correctly? Because typography is a means of communication.

mrweasel 5y ago
I still don’t see how picking a custom font over a default one contributed much to communication. Sure, the font need to be legable, clear destinction between letters all that stuff, but the system fonts is most likely better than a custom one for those things anyway.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Design and art communicate. In fact, that's all they do. Fonts are associated with different periods of time, different groups of people, different artistic and even philosophical movements. Picking a font can help communicate how you see yourself and what you are trying to achieve. A picture paints a thousand words. A world without typography would be a poorer world.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    Then why not share all typography with everyone under a license, that allows every OS maker to include all the fonts they want plus allowing users to choose what else to install and then only use system fonts? That way we can have it all, fast websites, without additional secret server side tracking, and the fonts of the system being used and the artist getting their message communicated. No need for any web font.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      I guess there aren’t any commercial incentives to do that. But that doesn’t change that typography is valuable.
      - zelphirkalt 5y ago

hexo 5y ago

Exactly!