4 ms·
What makes a font cheap-looking? I don't have an eye for this sort of thing but it looks fine to me.
by suby 3y ago
What makes a font cheap-looking? I don't have an eye for this sort of thing but it looks fine to me.
- JohnFen 3y agoI don't see the problem with it, either, but took the comment as a statement of personal taste rather than an objective criticism.
- mattkevan 3y agoNoto isn’t a cheap-looking font, but it’s the wrong choice in this context. It’s a very wide open font with big counters (eg. the middle bits of a and e.). That means it looks bigger than other fonts at the same size. It also takes up more space for the same amount of words. In the example above the text looks slightly too big for the surrounding space which makes it look cheap. Verdana, the font HN uses, was designed to be readable at small sizes on lo-res screens, so has very wide counters. It’s also why it looks ugly in high-res or when printed. Good interface fonts tend to be more condensed, so you get more on a line - think Roboto or Inter. It’s also probably why Apple moved from Helvetica, a good print font, to San Francisco which was specifically designed for UI.
- BearOso 3y agoThe context in the GP post clearly shows a high-dpi screen. So I think a font designed for printers or high-dpi is appropriate for it. Verdana is actually undersized relative to most fonts. The ascender range is too large, so the baseline is off as well. And as you pointed out, the blue zones are similar to Noto anyway, so that aspect wouldn't affect readability. I think you probably just have a low-res monitor. Noto has no bytecode hinting, so it would fall back to an auto hinter or remain unhinted and wouldn't present with the same sharpness.