3 ms·

[Disclaimer: My business licenses fonts via Typekit] Blaming Typekit for bad design is an interesting choice. Might as well blame browsers for giving designers

[Disclaimer: My business licenses fonts via Typekit] Blaming Typekit for bad design is an interesting choice. Might as well blame browsers for giving designers access to millions of terrible color choices via CSS while you're at it. Blame bad designers for not knowing how to use fonts. The community was not doing a good job with custom fonts for headings, pull quotes, etc. @font-face works pretty well, but foundries clearly weren't willing to sell licenses for it the same way they do for print/commercial use. It's not a difficult thing to explain to clients - it's a recurring fee just like hosting, SSL certificates, and domain registration. It handles all cross-browser issues, saves bandwidth, and gives you, the designer, easy access to a rather large library of fonts at no cost to you. Clients that can't afford the $2-8/month probably can't afford good design to begin with. If web fonts are too slow for you in all circumstances, how is Typekit any worse than a license from a foundry? Native fonts are great, and should be used extensively, but they really limit your options.

jfb 15y ago
Native fonts are only great if you can guarantee that your viewers have them installed. Otherwise, you're left with a wretched subset of garbage.
- ddagradi 15y ago
  No argument there. You can always count on Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana. Reliable old workhorses. And boring beyond belief.
Silhouette 15y ago
I'm not blaming Typekit for designers who don't know how to use fonts. I'm blaming Typekit for serving fonts that look terrible on many systems that aren't running the latest and greatest browsers and operating systems (i.e., most of the machines used to browse the web). Many of them don't look that great even on those newer systems either, certainly not rendering with the quality that you would expect from a pro font displayed in a native application running locally on the machine. For a while shortly after these font-hosting services started going live, every trendy design blog out there started to look worse than it did before, and I couldn't figure out why. For a short time, I actually assumed I'd inadvertently messed up my ClearType settings, or downloaded a dubious update from Microsoft, or found another rendering bug in Firefox, or something along those lines. Then I started to notice these little "T" badges in the corner of the pages that didn't render properly, and discovered the hard way that hardly any web fonts were properly hinted for on-screen use, which is why they all looked horrible compared to things like Verdana and Arial/Helvetica. To be fair, a few of them are better now. Still, Typekit's own site looks pretty bad on this computer (I've just checked) and the irony is that it's their custom fonts that render like something from the Windows 95 days, while the body text in Georgia looks as clean as usual. It's not exactly a great sales pitch when the part of your site using your technology looks obviously visibly worse than the part of your site using the tried and tested workhorse you're asking us to give up. [Edit: Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png Notice that even at display size, the rendering of the heading text in Proxima Nova looks awful. Meanwhile, trusty Georgia even renders with decent italics at body text size. And it looks that way on several systems here, from Firefox on Windows XP to Chrome on Windows 7, so it's nothing to do with ClearType rendering differences, the Firefox rendering problems with HarfBuzz, or any other such excuse.] As I've said many times, the reality is that at today's typical screen resolutions, at body text sizes, there are only so many ways you can turn on the pixels that are going to work. We have had a few brilliantly designed fonts created specifically for that usage available to us for a long time. Anything that is supposed to replace them needs to look different enough to be worth the hassle and render at least as clearly, and most/all of the hosted web fonts currently fail to meet one or both of those criteria. I'm sorry if this is some sort of downvote-worthy regressive heresy, but I go by results and the screenshot does not lie.

jfb 15y ago

Native fonts are only great if you can guarantee that your viewers have them installed. Otherwise, you're left with a wretched subset of garbage.

ddagradi 15y ago
No argument there. You can always count on Helvetica, Arial, Georgia and Verdana. Reliable old workhorses. And boring beyond belief.

Silhouette 15y ago

I'm not blaming Typekit for designers who don't know how to use fonts. I'm blaming Typekit for serving fonts that look terrible on many systems that aren't running the latest and greatest browsers and operating systems (i.e., most of the machines used to browse the web). Many of them don't look that great even on those newer systems either, certainly not rendering with the quality that you would expect from a pro font displayed in a native application running locally on the machine. For a while shortly after these font-hosting services started going live, every trendy design blog out there started to look worse than it did before, and I couldn't figure out why. For a short time, I actually assumed I'd inadvertently messed up my ClearType settings, or downloaded a dubious update from Microsoft, or found another rendering bug in Firefox, or something along those lines. Then I started to notice these little "T" badges in the corner of the pages that didn't render properly, and discovered the hard way that hardly any web fonts were properly hinted for on-screen use, which is why they all looked horrible compared to things like Verdana and Arial/Helvetica. To be fair, a few of them are better now. Still, Typekit's own site looks pretty bad on this computer (I've just checked) and the irony is that it's their custom fonts that render like something from the Windows 95 days, while the body text in Georgia looks as clean as usual. It's not exactly a great sales pitch when the part of your site using your technology looks obviously visibly worse than the part of your site using the tried and tested workhorse you're asking us to give up. [Edit: Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png http://i.imgur.com/cEGNL.png Notice that even at display size, the rendering of the heading text in Proxima Nova looks awful. Meanwhile, trusty Georgia even renders with decent italics at body text size. And it looks that way on several systems here, from Firefox on Windows XP to Chrome on Windows 7, so it's nothing to do with ClearType rendering differences, the Firefox rendering problems with HarfBuzz, or any other such excuse.] As I've said many times, the reality is that at today's typical screen resolutions, at body text sizes, there are only so many ways you can turn on the pixels that are going to work. We have had a few brilliantly designed fonts created specifically for that usage available to us for a long time. Anything that is supposed to replace them needs to look different enough to be worth the hassle and render at least as clearly, and most/all of the hosted web fonts currently fail to meet one or both of those criteria. I'm sorry if this is some sort of downvote-worthy regressive heresy, but I go by results and the screenshot does not lie.