6 ms·

This is a very shortsighted view from developer who forget a web page is not only a bunch of text. Designer also play an important role to provide the subtle de

This is a very shortsighted view from developer who forget a web page is not only a bunch of text. Designer also play an important role to provide the subtle design element that developers don't value. By blocking all web fonts and fallback to only system font, you may still be able to read the text, but will completely missed the design.

qsort 4y ago
It's called User-Agent, not HipsterDesigner-Agent. My browser, my connection, my rules.
eloisius 4y ago
I’ve been blocking webfonts for a long time, and not being subjected to the design is mostly a feature. The only time it’s not is when instead of glyphs you get weird alt text like UP_ARROW.
unmole 4y ago
> provide the subtle design element that developers don't value Does anybody apart from designers actually care?
- jozzy-james 4y ago
  with the a/b testing we’ve done in our admittedly niche market - yeah it matters
  - ravenstine 4y ago
    Doesn't that depend on what the A/B test is measuring? A/B tests can measure the wrong thing. "Engagement" is often seen as a good thing in and of itself and is not investigated for errors.
daqnal 4y ago
True, but I believe the point is that the author is willing to sacrifice this for speed and privacy. Many who are privacy-conscious generally don't care about design and are prioritized on functionality and data safety. That's not to say design isn't important. I love apps and sites that follow fluid and modern UX, I just see it as second underneath privacy.
Dalewyn 4y ago
I have never felt a page read better with custom fonts instead of local system fonts. I suppose the reason is because most local system fonts prioritize readability to a fault, while custom fonts are chosen for aesthetics (and aesthetics don't necessarily relate to readability). A webpage is a bunch of text, if your webpage can't be read with something like "font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;" then you are doing it wrong.
- phantomathkg 4y ago
  A good design should have good fallback. Yes. A random example will be bbc.com, where BBC Reith fallback to Arial, Helvetica Free Sans and San serif. With modern web "application", the chances you see a bunch of text would either be the T&C page, documentation you read, or news website. These days we shop online as much as we do physically, so I pick two random clothing brand, Uniqlo and Levis. To create the same experience you shop online as you do offline. These two websites employ their font instead of system font, Uniqlo Pro and Helvetica Now. From a function point of view, blocking those font does not stop you from buying their clothes. But part of the user experience will be lost. Disclaimer, I am engineer in the media industry and has no association with the two example websites.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    User experience is more than fonts. Most of the sites are unreadable at default browser zoom. Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days). Gray on gray is the norm.
    - dspillett 4y ago
      > Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days) I like to print things like Train times and such when heading out, just in case I need to alter plans and tech fails so I can't look up the next option online. When flying on holiday I have a little was of paper with connection details, luggage rules, etc. Printing is increasingly unusable direct from sites/apps so I've taken to either writing my own notes (which has the bonus of saving paper) or taking screenshots (which also saves paper as cropping allows less irrelevant detail & site chrome to be included). I'm almost nobody in a large number of other respects too though!
RedShift1 4y ago
Screw designers. They have ruined so many things over the years. It's time to take back control.
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  As both a developer and designer, this comment seems absurd to me. Art and information both play vital roles in the human experience.
  - BLKNSLVR 4y ago
    I get the feeling there are a lot of points of view in the above sub-thread that are using mutually exclusive definitions of "design". Art being one that doesn't factor in greatly, but also has its own subjective definition. There's design that's for helping the user access and process the information. I like this design, I'm all for it; pro-user. There's design that's for aesthetic; motif; differentiation for the sake of differentiation. This probably overlaps with "art" and can, and often does, actively work against usage of the site for the sake of 'cool'. Works for people that rate aesthetic over content. Then there's design for engagement and / or advertising revenue (and I'll include "data slurping" as advertising revenue). In relation to the topic, its likely one of the other design choices is leading to secondary data slurping that the website designer may not be aware of.
    - phantomathkg 4y ago
      I don't think form and function should be mutually exclusive. Instead I want it to be a continuum, and I am trying to combat some of the view here who try to turn the function dial to 11. With good balance, we should be able to create a world that is both aesthetic and functional.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    A computer and any code that execute within one are tools, and tools must first and foremost serve to enable its user. This means when it comes to software design, function always trumps form. A tool should never be designed with form over function in mind, it must always be function over form. Any form (design) that impedes the function must be culled with extreme prejudice. When it comes to remote fonts, they slow down page download and consequently load time, they violate privacy rules and laws, they impede accessibility when fallbacks fail or do not exist (eg: Webdings, aka "icon" fonts), and objectively they only serve as a form of luxury for the website with no regard for end-users. Most of us also know from experience that software designers by and large prioritize form over function, oftentimes with complete disregard for the function thereof. So I second grandparent post's opinion: Screw designers. Removing them from the development process will bring about more net benefits than any benefits they might be bringing to the table.
HelixEndeavor 4y ago
What if the design is bad?
- phantomathkg 4y ago
  What if the developer is wrong?
  - megous 4y ago
    More like a "what if user is wrong" since the user is making a font choice in this case.
- FractalHQ 4y ago
  Get a better designer..
tjpnz 4y ago
Some of the most memorable things I've read over the past year have been on Gemini which falls back to the system font or one picked by the user. I'm not saying that there's no place for design, but if your choice of webfont is a single point of failure within it you have no business calling yourself a designer.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
manicpolymath 4y ago
Funny you use the word “shortsighted” - for screen readers to work right your web page had better be a bunch of text.
tejtm 4y ago
we must be after different things. the web is for the content. I decide how my view of it appears. this has always been the case html provides __suggestions__ css and what not let me interpret those suggestions as I will. If you want to curate your design experience put it in a pdf for your fanbase and leave my day to day browsing out of it.
adastra22 4y ago
> you may still be able to read the text, but will completely missed the design So you'll keep everything that matters and throw out the stuff that doesn't. Got it!
legitster 4y ago
Chesterton's Fence. "I see no reason for fonts, so they must serve no real purpose."
hulitu 4y ago
The "design" is mostly crap anyway so i don't see any win by loading obscure fonts from an obscure web server.
megous 4y ago
Font readability is the function of familiarity with the given font. So if the user clicks that checkbox to disable thirdparty fonts in the browser and use a familiar font everywhere, I think the user is right. :) That's why I disable thirdparty fonts by default and bug our designers when some text overflows in our app, due to some fixed width assumption in CSS, because system native font they did not design for is wider.
ogurechny 4y ago
Let me explain how it actually works. I visit the website, see horrible text (because designer expected everyone to use high DPI screen or specific rasterization/hinting back-end), click on the icon to disable fonts, and then, yes, I am able to read the text. Which is the only reason I am on this page. Not even the slightest thought about page design appears in my head, just temporary irritation from the obstruction.
- 9dev 4y ago
  But you do realise that you’re part of a very small, albeit vocal, minority here? Most people actually do value a coherent visual design, which can be and repeatedly has been proven in studies and A/B testing. This holds true, whether you like it or not.
  - ogurechny 4y ago
    Have you seen what “regular people” do in such situations? They squint, reach for their glasses, or look for the page zoom controls (which takes a lot of their time). It's almost as if you are happy that those people are not tech savvy enough to use a quick fix (for the problem someone else introduced). It's almost as if the whole industry is based on exploiting the lack of education and understanding of those “regular people”. You can also A/B test the guillotine vs human executioner. The best option is not always a good option.
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    I certainly do value a coherent visual design! That's why it bugs me so much when designers mess with the standards, trying to make their little slices of the web look different from the rest. Blocking web fonts, zapping away floaty banners and other design irritations via uBlock Origin, and making liberal use of Reader Mode gives me a much more coherent experience of the web.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Most developers suck at design but most designers suck at development. If your designer can't make your website work well with one of the hundreds of fonts preloaded on my machine, I don't know what to tell you. If your website looks like crap because your designer couldn't come up with a good fallback font that's still on the designer. It's like "web colours" all over again. Web designers should work within the constraints of the user agent or they shouldn't design for the web, and one of those constraints is that the font doesn't always look exactly like the designer wants it to look. It's called a user agent for a reason, these days more and more because the source it's rendering is as anti-user as can be. I have web fonts turned off because I'm sick of text shifting because the particular Arial-but-not-really font a website insists on got loaded in. I've also occasionally had to use reader mode because the "design" was very fancy but practically unreadable.
marssaxman 4y ago
I "completely miss the design" as often as possible, stripping it all off via Reader Mode.
alok-g 4y ago
How bad do you find my website? :-) (Asking genuinely) Sample post: https://alokgovil.com/understanding-self-reliance/ https://alokgovil.com/understanding-self-reliance/ It's using just Arial and Times New Roman.

qsort 4y ago

It's called User-Agent, not HipsterDesigner-Agent. My browser, my connection, my rules.

eloisius 4y ago

I’ve been blocking webfonts for a long time, and not being subjected to the design is mostly a feature. The only time it’s not is when instead of glyphs you get weird alt text like UP_ARROW.

unmole 4y ago

> provide the subtle design element that developers don't value Does anybody apart from designers actually care?

jozzy-james 4y ago
with the a/b testing we’ve done in our admittedly niche market - yeah it matters
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Doesn't that depend on what the A/B test is measuring? A/B tests can measure the wrong thing. "Engagement" is often seen as a good thing in and of itself and is not investigated for errors.

daqnal 4y ago

True, but I believe the point is that the author is willing to sacrifice this for speed and privacy. Many who are privacy-conscious generally don't care about design and are prioritized on functionality and data safety. That's not to say design isn't important. I love apps and sites that follow fluid and modern UX, I just see it as second underneath privacy.

Dalewyn 4y ago

I have never felt a page read better with custom fonts instead of local system fonts. I suppose the reason is because most local system fonts prioritize readability to a fault, while custom fonts are chosen for aesthetics (and aesthetics don't necessarily relate to readability). A webpage is a bunch of text, if your webpage can't be read with something like "font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;" then you are doing it wrong.

phantomathkg 4y ago
A good design should have good fallback. Yes. A random example will be bbc.com, where BBC Reith fallback to Arial, Helvetica Free Sans and San serif. With modern web "application", the chances you see a bunch of text would either be the T&C page, documentation you read, or news website. These days we shop online as much as we do physically, so I pick two random clothing brand, Uniqlo and Levis. To create the same experience you shop online as you do offline. These two websites employ their font instead of system font, Uniqlo Pro and Helvetica Now. From a function point of view, blocking those font does not stop you from buying their clothes. But part of the user experience will be lost. Disclaimer, I am engineer in the media industry and has no association with the two example websites.
- hulitu 4y ago
  User experience is more than fonts. Most of the sites are unreadable at default browser zoom. Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days). Gray on gray is the norm.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    > Printing is almost impossible (i know, nobody prints those days) I like to print things like Train times and such when heading out, just in case I need to alter plans and tech fails so I can't look up the next option online. When flying on holiday I have a little was of paper with connection details, luggage rules, etc. Printing is increasingly unusable direct from sites/apps so I've taken to either writing my own notes (which has the bonus of saving paper) or taking screenshots (which also saves paper as cropping allows less irrelevant detail & site chrome to be included). I'm almost nobody in a large number of other respects too though!

RedShift1 4y ago

Screw designers. They have ruined so many things over the years. It's time to take back control.

FractalHQ 4y ago
As both a developer and designer, this comment seems absurd to me. Art and information both play vital roles in the human experience.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  I get the feeling there are a lot of points of view in the above sub-thread that are using mutually exclusive definitions of "design". Art being one that doesn't factor in greatly, but also has its own subjective definition. There's design that's for helping the user access and process the information. I like this design, I'm all for it; pro-user. There's design that's for aesthetic; motif; differentiation for the sake of differentiation. This probably overlaps with "art" and can, and often does, actively work against usage of the site for the sake of 'cool'. Works for people that rate aesthetic over content. Then there's design for engagement and / or advertising revenue (and I'll include "data slurping" as advertising revenue). In relation to the topic, its likely one of the other design choices is leading to secondary data slurping that the website designer may not be aware of.
  - phantomathkg 4y ago
    I don't think form and function should be mutually exclusive. Instead I want it to be a continuum, and I am trying to combat some of the view here who try to turn the function dial to 11. With good balance, we should be able to create a world that is both aesthetic and functional.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  A computer and any code that execute within one are tools, and tools must first and foremost serve to enable its user. This means when it comes to software design, function always trumps form. A tool should never be designed with form over function in mind, it must always be function over form. Any form (design) that impedes the function must be culled with extreme prejudice. When it comes to remote fonts, they slow down page download and consequently load time, they violate privacy rules and laws, they impede accessibility when fallbacks fail or do not exist (eg: Webdings, aka "icon" fonts), and objectively they only serve as a form of luxury for the website with no regard for end-users. Most of us also know from experience that software designers by and large prioritize form over function, oftentimes with complete disregard for the function thereof. So I second grandparent post's opinion: Screw designers. Removing them from the development process will bring about more net benefits than any benefits they might be bringing to the table.

HelixEndeavor 4y ago

What if the design is bad?

phantomathkg 4y ago
What if the developer is wrong?
- megous 4y ago
  More like a "what if user is wrong" since the user is making a font choice in this case.
FractalHQ 4y ago
Get a better designer..

tjpnz 4y ago

Some of the most memorable things I've read over the past year have been on Gemini which falls back to the system font or one picked by the user. I'm not saying that there's no place for design, but if your choice of webfont is a single point of failure within it you have no business calling yourself a designer.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

manicpolymath 4y ago

Funny you use the word “shortsighted” - for screen readers to work right your web page had better be a bunch of text.

tejtm 4y ago

we must be after different things. the web is for the content. I decide how my view of it appears. this has always been the case html provides __suggestions__ css and what not let me interpret those suggestions as I will. If you want to curate your design experience put it in a pdf for your fanbase and leave my day to day browsing out of it.

adastra22 4y ago

> you may still be able to read the text, but will completely missed the design So you'll keep everything that matters and throw out the stuff that doesn't. Got it!

legitster 4y ago

Chesterton's Fence. "I see no reason for fonts, so they must serve no real purpose."

hulitu 4y ago

The "design" is mostly crap anyway so i don't see any win by loading obscure fonts from an obscure web server.

megous 4y ago

Font readability is the function of familiarity with the given font. So if the user clicks that checkbox to disable thirdparty fonts in the browser and use a familiar font everywhere, I think the user is right. :) That's why I disable thirdparty fonts by default and bug our designers when some text overflows in our app, due to some fixed width assumption in CSS, because system native font they did not design for is wider.

ogurechny 4y ago

Let me explain how it actually works. I visit the website, see horrible text (because designer expected everyone to use high DPI screen or specific rasterization/hinting back-end), click on the icon to disable fonts, and then, yes, I am able to read the text. Which is the only reason I am on this page. Not even the slightest thought about page design appears in my head, just temporary irritation from the obstruction.

9dev 4y ago
But you do realise that you’re part of a very small, albeit vocal, minority here? Most people actually do value a coherent visual design, which can be and repeatedly has been proven in studies and A/B testing. This holds true, whether you like it or not.
- ogurechny 4y ago
  Have you seen what “regular people” do in such situations? They squint, reach for their glasses, or look for the page zoom controls (which takes a lot of their time). It's almost as if you are happy that those people are not tech savvy enough to use a quick fix (for the problem someone else introduced). It's almost as if the whole industry is based on exploiting the lack of education and understanding of those “regular people”. You can also A/B test the guillotine vs human executioner. The best option is not always a good option.
- marssaxman 4y ago
  I certainly do value a coherent visual design! That's why it bugs me so much when designers mess with the standards, trying to make their little slices of the web look different from the rest. Blocking web fonts, zapping away floaty banners and other design irritations via uBlock Origin, and making liberal use of Reader Mode gives me a much more coherent experience of the web.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Most developers suck at design but most designers suck at development. If your designer can't make your website work well with one of the hundreds of fonts preloaded on my machine, I don't know what to tell you. If your website looks like crap because your designer couldn't come up with a good fallback font that's still on the designer. It's like "web colours" all over again. Web designers should work within the constraints of the user agent or they shouldn't design for the web, and one of those constraints is that the font doesn't always look exactly like the designer wants it to look. It's called a user agent for a reason, these days more and more because the source it's rendering is as anti-user as can be. I have web fonts turned off because I'm sick of text shifting because the particular Arial-but-not-really font a website insists on got loaded in. I've also occasionally had to use reader mode because the "design" was very fancy but practically unreadable.

marssaxman 4y ago

I "completely miss the design" as often as possible, stripping it all off via Reader Mode.

alok-g 4y ago

How bad do you find my website? :-) (Asking genuinely) Sample post: https://alokgovil.com/understanding-self-reliance/ https://alokgovil.com/understanding-self-reliance/ It's using just Arial and Times New Roman.